‘The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton – both the woman and her poetry – is constant and deeply felt’ Toni Morrison

Lucille Clifton was one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century. This award-winning collection of her poems showcases the simplicity and song-like grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, dreams, spirituality, womanhood, illness, sexuality and racial injustice.

‘Physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds’ Elizabeth Alexander, New Yorker

‘Clifton’s earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago’ Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times

‘A poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves’ Peggy Rosenthal