How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (American Poets Continuum Series, 180)

Product Description
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.
These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style―a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.
Review
“Clifton was one of America’s great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative.” ―Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate
“Clifton’s earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual.” ―Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times
“Open up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words.” ―Danez Smith, The Week
About the Author
Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) 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 (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry:
the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016);
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and
Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
water sign woman
the woman who feels everything sits in her new house waiting for someone to come who knows how to carry water without spilling, who knows why the desert is sprinkled with salt, why tomorrow is such a long and ominous word. they say to the feel things woman that little she dreams is possible, that there is only so much joy to go around, only so much water. there are no questions for this, no arguments. she has to forget to remember the edge of the sea, they say, to forget how to swim to the edge, she has to forget how to feel. the woman who feels everything sits in her new house retaining the secret the desert knew when it walked up from the ocean, the desert, so beautiful in her eyes; water will come again if you can wait for it. she feels what the desert feels. she waits.