Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems

by Sonia Sanchez

Overview

A dazzling exploration of the intimate and public landscapes of passion from the American Poetry Society's 2018 Wallace Stevens Award–winner. 

In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sonia Sanchez writes of the many forms love takes: burning, dreamy, disappointed, vulnerable. With words that revel and reveal, she shares love's painful beauty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807095317
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	03/06/2012
Series:	Bluestreak , #7
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sonia Sanchez-award-winning poet, activist, scholar, and formerly the Laura Carnell professor of English and women's studies at Temple University-is the author of sixteen books, including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin.

Editorial Reviews

In all her words, Sanchez grabs your heart.
—Vibe

Julia Chance

This collection of privately and publicly addressed love poems is targeted, one would guess, at the romantically inclined. And, yes, these poems fill the bill: one can imagine them being read in breathy sequence to an aroused and appreciative audience: "this is not a fire/ sale but I am in heat/ each time I see ya." Mostly adapted from Japanese forms like haiku and tanka, with a few longer poems addressed in homage to the late rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, Cornel West, and others, they fail to showcase three of this poet's most potent strengths: economical storytelling; the ability to cut through to the heart of things with sharp-edged, non-sentimental descriptions of pain; and a concise and affecting use of rhyme. Occasionally, however, they do exhibit her gift for humor: "I wuz in Kansas/ dorothy and toto wuznt/ a jacuzzi, sky, you." -- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Library, New York

Library Journal

Praise for Sonia Sanchez:

"Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest." -Maya Angelou

"With an unblinking and critical poet's eye, Sonia Sanchez has been setting her readers straight, telling the 'terrible beauty,' and reflecting images in ways that simultaneously solicit tears and laughter." -Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Ms.

"[Sanchez] looks deeply into that most dangerous of places—the heart." -Quarterly Black Review

From the Publisher