"The acclaimed author of ""The Black Notebooks"" offers a collection of poetry that spans 50 years of life experience." - (Baker & Taylor)
Winner, 2020 Frost Medal
Finalist, 2019 National Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2020 BCALA Literary Awards
Toi Derricotte’s story is a hero’s journey—a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
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Chicago Distribution Center)
Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey'a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. 'I': New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
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Chicago Distribution Center)
A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry
Recipient of the 2020 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Poetry
BCALA Honor Book for Best Poetry Award 2020 - (Chicago Distribution Center)
Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Chicago Distribution Center)
Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker's Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Chicago Distribution Center)
The blessed angels
How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
table, as if in a bunch
whispering. How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse. Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars. Each heart
is a gift for the king. When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping. One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent. Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms & near invisible.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Derricotte (The Undertaker's Daughter), writer and cofounder of the Cave Canem Foundation, is a seminal figure in the American poetry community. Drawing from five previous books spanning over four decades, this retrospective volume unflinchingly explores the author's complex experiences as a light-skinned black woman in America. "For years, to avoid conversations that would take/ a lifetime, minds purposely dulled for generations/ (‘Single consciousness,' Dubois might have called it),/ I would say when introduced—to avoid later embarrassment/ For us both—I'm Toi Derricotte, I'm black, and stick my hand out." Poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, as well as artists and performers such as Natalie Cole, Billie Holiday, and Alice Neel appear throughout the collection. In raw, confessional poems, the speaker chronicles the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father, as well as the graphic, stunning and powerfully feminine experience of a natural childbirth. Derricotte's attention lingers on places of struggle where life is at its most vibrant, urgent, and surprising: "to hold that pain/ until it writes a poem, to hold it/ for years until you learn both the holding and the writing." (Mar.)
Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly.