Lucille Clifton is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and author of children's books. Her most recent poetry book, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1969–1999 (BOA), won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton's BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 and Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, while Clifton's The Terrible Stories (BOA) was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton has received fellowships from the NEA, an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Shelley Memorial Prize and the Charity Randall Citation. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities as St. Mary's College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. She lives in Columbia, MD.
]]>In Voices, Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life's many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton's ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box.
"cream of wheat"
sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they
walk in front humming this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chef's cap
wondering what ever pictured me
then left me personless
rastus
i read in an old paper that i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son
toward dawn we head back
to our shelves
our boxes ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile i simmer
to myself what is my name
BOA Editions is thrilled to present the newest poetry collection by the one and only Lucille Clifton.
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