Voices

In Voices, National Book Award-winner Lucille Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing compact poems that reveal powerful, sometimes disturbing truths. These include poems written for and about her mother and father, aunts, uncles and nephews, and extended family. Spare muscular language combine with copious silences to create the trademark Clifton poem – one is which the speaker always understands that the joy, grief and loss others have experienced stands in direct relationship with her own. One of Clifton's aesthetic strengths is her ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes several dramatic monologues spoken by animals. Additionally, the food products Aunt Jemima syrup and Cream of Wheat get their say. Here is Cream of Wheat's take on who he truly might be, as he imagines himself, Jemima and Uncle Ben (from Uncle Ben's Rice) sharing a late night stroll through the supermarket aisles:

cream of wheat

sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me     they
walk in front     remembering this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chef's cap
wondering about what ever pictured me
then left me personless
Rastus
i read in an old paper
i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son     toward dawn
we return to our shelves
our boxes     ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile     i simmer     what
is my name  

"National Book Award-winner Clifton has long enjoyed national acclaim for her careful, colloquial, compact renditions of African-American voices...and these poems look even further back, to the origin of writing. Clifton retains an undeniable sincerity, an openness to her own emotions, and a rare warmth."--Publishers Weekly "Lucille's unique ability to not only see but to capture emotional dichotomies of issues surrounding issues and braid them like challah is what makes her one of the most frequently taught and famous poets living in the world today."--Rattle "An eloquence that is akin to justice, that arises out of voicelessness, that tests but respects the limits of language, and yields to acknowledge the final dominion of silence, is the hallmark of Clifton’s work, now honed to its essential truth-speaking power: 'Sometimes we hear them in our dreams/ rattling their skulls, clicking/ their bony fingers/ they have heard me beseeching/…but who can distinguish one human voice/ amid such choruses/ of desire?'"–The Buffalo News   BOA is honored to present this new collection by one of America's most distinguished and beloved poets, Lucille Clifton.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2008

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 978-1-934414-11-8
Price: $22.95
Publishing Date: September 2008
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-934414-12-5
Price: $16.00
Publishing Date: September 2008