Here is Mendi Lewis Obadike on what she learned from Ms. Lucille who was her teacher: “That being a writer has to do with being a part of a community, learning to touch another.
“And poetry is a way of wondering that involves other people.”
Here is Ama Codjoe: “Clifton made space for my body in poetry/in the world. My black body. My hips. My histories. My contradictions. My desires. And there are so many mysteries in her writing too. […] There’s more to say but for that I’d want sun spilling through a window, her books around me like a skirt, and you and me with cups and cups of tea.”
About the Author
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936–February 13, 2010) was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA, 2000) won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA, 1987). In 1996, her collection The Terrible Stories (BOA, 1996) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.
About the Editor
Aracelis Girmay (December 10, 1977) is the author of three books of poems: the black maria (BOA, 2016); Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of a GLCA New Writers Award; and Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing and with her sister collaborated on the forthcoming children’s book What Do You Know? (Enchanted Lion, 2021). For her work, Girmay was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and in 2015 received the Whiting Award for Poetry. In 2018 she was also selected by Elizabeth Alexander to receive the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Girmay is the mother of two and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.
BOA EDITIONS, LTD. AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES
No. 1
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 2
She
M. L. Rosenthal
No. 3
Living With Distance
Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
No. 4
Not Just Any Death
Michael Waters
No. 5
That Was Then: New and Selected Poems
Isabella Gardner
No. 6
Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People
William Stafford
No. 7
The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980
John Logan
No. 8
Signatures
Joseph Stroud
No. 9
People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983
Louis Simpson
No. 10
Yin
Carolyn Kizer
No. 11
Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada
Bill Tremblay
No. 12
Seeing It Was So
Anthony Piccione
No. 13
Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems
No. 14
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
Lucille Clifton
No. 15
Next: New Poems
Lucille Clifton
No. 16
Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family
William B. Patrick
No. 17
John Logan: The Collected Poems
No. 18
Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems
No. 19
The Sunken Lightship
Peter Makuck
No. 20
The City in Which I Love You
Li-Young Lee
No. 21
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990
Lucille Clifton
No. 22
John Logan: The Collected Fiction
No. 23
Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays
Delmore Schwartz
No. 24
Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard
Gerald Costanzo
No. 25
The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems
Barton Sutter
No. 26
Each in His Season
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 27
Wordworks: Poems Selected and New
Richard Kostelanetz
No. 28
What
We Carry Dorianne Laux
No. 29
Red Suitcase
Naomi Shihab Nye
No. 30
Song
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
No. 31
The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 32
For the Kingdom
Anthony Piccione
No. 33
The Quicken Tree
Bill Knott
No. 34
These Upraised Hands
William B. Patrick
No. 35
Crazy Horse in Stillness
William Heyen
No. 36
Quick, Now, Always
Mark Irwin
No. 37
I Have Tasted the Apple
Mary Crow
No. 38
The Terrible Stories
Lucille Clifton
No. 39
The Heat of Arrivals
Ray Gonzalez
No. 40
Jimmy & Rita
Kim Addonizio
No. 41
Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum
Michael Waters
No. 42
Against Distance
Peter Makuck
No. 43
The Night Path
Laurie Kutchins
No. 44
Radiography
Bruce Bond
No. 45
At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties
David Ignatow
No. 46
Trillium
Richard Foerster
No. 47
Fuel
Naomi Shihab Nye
No. 48
Gratitude
Sam Hamill
No. 49
Diana, Charles, & the Queen
William Heyen
No. 50
Plus Shipping
Bob Hicok
No. 51
Cabato Sentora
Ray Gonzalez
No. 52
We Didn’t Come Here for This
William B. Patrick
No. 53
The Vandals
Alan Michael Parker
No. 54
To Get Here
Wendy Mnookin
No. 55
Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems
David Ignatow
No. 56
Dusty Angel
Michael Blumenthal
No. 57
The Tiger Iris
Joan Swift
No. 58
White City
Mark Irwin
No. 59
Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999
Bill Knott
No. 60
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988–2000
Lucille Clifton
No. 61
Tell Me
Kim Addonizio
No. 62
Smoke
Dorianne Laux
No. 63
Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems
Michael Waters
No. 64
Rancho Notorious
Richard Garcia
No. 65
Jam
Joe-Anne McLaughlin
No. 66
A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems
Edited, with an Introduction by Michael Waters
No. 67
Small Gods of Grief
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
No. 68
Book of My Nights
Li-Young Lee
No. 69
Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies
Charles Harper Webb
No. 70
Double Going
Richard Foerster
No. 71
What He Took
Wendy Mnookin
No. 72
The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
Ray Gonzalez
No. 73
Mules of Love
Ellen Bass
No. 74
The Guests at the Gate
Anthony Piccione
No. 75
Dumb Luck
Sam Hamill
No. 76
Love Song with Motor Vehicles
Alan Michael Parker
No. 77
Life Watch
Willis Barnstone
No. 78
The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940–2001
Louis Simpson
No. 79
Is
Wayne Dodd
No. 80
Late
Cecilia Woloch
No. 81
Precipitates
Debra Kang Dean
No. 82
The Orchard
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
No. 83
Bright Hunger
Mark