Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners

by Angela Jackson

Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry

Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 1993

Reviews

[Poupina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being that it's her first full-length collection this holds great potential. My favorite poems have a catchy blues beat, but some fall flat. Some individual pieces go on too long, telling rather than showing and the weakest poems are so similar in tone to the best, that individual triumphs are buried. That spider image cannot sustain 100 pages. I didn't find it particularly tying but AJ insisted on using it in every poem - applied in mere formula.