Lucille Clifton Knihy

Edited with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates famous poems and shines light on lesser-known poems by poet―and national treasure―Lucille Clifton (1936–2010).Lucille Clifton’s poetry defined strength through adversity focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life. Clifton’s poems were widely celebrated during her lifetime, and she received wide acclaim for her work including the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems continue to inspire a new generation of readers and writers in the 21st century.In How to Carry Water, formidable younger poet Aracelis Girmay (winner of the Whiting Award, GLCA Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) introduces a selection of Clifton’s work that is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous social and political moment.

Brimming over with the inspirational words and thoughts of some of our finest writers, Cries of the Spirit is a beautiful sourcebook of poetry and prose in praise of life and all that it entails. Here women's voices fill the age-old silence about matters central to their experience-from menstruation, sexual intimacy, and childbirth to caretaking, household rituals, and death. These writings represent a healing vision of the sacred that emerges from the particular consciousness of women-a vision that partakes of the world of earth and flesh.

A moving family biography in which the poet traces her family history back through Jim Crow, the slave trade, and all the way to the women of the Dahomey people in West Africa. Buffalo, New York. A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”

Continuing its tradition of offering the most stimulating and eclectic collection of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, The Beacon Best returns this year with the acclaimed writer Junot Díaz as guest editor. The 2001 edition features not only celebrated wordsmiths like Ha Jin, Louise Erdrich, Francisco Goldman, Chang-rae Lee, and Zadie Smith, but also emerging new talents like T. E. Holt and Rhina P. Espaillat. This year's edition boasts deeply compassionate stories that explore the widening gap between our day-to-day experiences and what we too often read or see elsewhere. Writes Díaz in his introduction, "The freshness and originality and humanity of these writers and their work renewed me." We hope that the Beacon Best of 2001 will delight and challenge you to see the world with new eyes.Featuring the work Agha Shahid Ali Josefina Báez, Maile Chapman, Lucille Clifton, Edwidge Danticat, Cornelius Eady, Louise Erdrich, Rhina P. Espaillat, John Frazier, Dagoberto Gilb, Francisco Goldman, T. E. Holt, Ha Jin, Chang-rae Lee , Li-Young Lee, Nega Mezlekia, Ishle Park, Pedro Ponce, Patrick A. Rosal, Sonia Sanchez, Danzy Senna, Angela Shaw, Zadie Smith, James Ellis Thomas, Reetika Vaziran, Elissa Wald, Felicia Ward, and Tim Winton.