At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987-2010

At the Gate gathers more than seventy previously unpublished poems by the iconic American poet Lucille Clifton written over the last two decades of her life. Discovered in digital archives by poet and scholar Kazim Ali, these poems span a prolific and reflective period in Clifton’s career as she shifted from typewriters to word processors and desktop computers. Many were originally drafted for publication, but set aside—until now.

Edited by Ali, this collection includes a contextual Foreword and detailed notes that illuminate Clifton’s late writing process and the editorial journey of these poems—deepening and expanding the themes that defined Clifton’s celebrated body of work.

At the Gate is a profound and necessary addition to Clifton’s legacy—one that reaffirms her place as a poet of the body, the spirit, and the deep truths that we must endure—her voice as intimate, fearless, and luminous as ever.

Praise for At the Gate 

“This fresh brush with Clifton’s voice is nothing shy of a miracle—like a visitation from the other worlds the mighty poet herself taught so many of us to believe were real. And Kazim Ali’s meticulous framing of the drafts, variants and references making up these uncollected poems is a glorious window into how one of the essential voices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made and understood her work.” —Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States

“At the Gate is an astonishing concentration of language opened, attended to, dreaming. Sharpening into clarity, whispering, raging, shifting—line to line, poem to poem—across planes, these poems are traces of Black feminist paths to relation. How we have needed them. And so it feels miraculous that a new book of Lucille Clifton’s poems should come to us now. In profound and ongoing attunement with Clifton’s oeuvre, scholar, poet, and editor Kazim Ali brings to us an essential text by one of the great practitioners of our time.” —aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

your life

i am making a mirror
of your life.
i am turning two fishboys
slick as stone.
they will pour from me
like each other’s cup.
they will call your absence
father.
later their faces will dry
into twins. they will
ask in one voice
their father’s right name.
make poems, i will tell them,
make poems.