A daughter's geography
(Book)

A series of hard-hitting poems that show the author's daughter both the internal and external (Nicaragua, Haiti, Atlanta) geography that are her heritage. Shange maps the expanding horizons of the black imagination, from the indigo moods of Harlem streets to the sun-drenched colors of the Caribbean, from passionate songs of pain and outrage to the tipsy cakewalks of love's exhilaration. She creates out of the music of black speech poems that shout with life and power, declare her visions and map the geography of life and beauty she would claim for her daughter. Many of the poems are fuelled by anger as when she writes of various kinds of men -- macho, the flasher, the obscene phone caller -- but when she calls up images of her childhood and of black history to throw light on the present, her anger disappears. ISBN 0-312-18342-9 : $9.95.

BSLW RECAT 2023