Women's Voices For Change

Because this poem invites us to read it as metaphor, it was a short leap to consider the poem’s application to our country’s current political crisis, neither side really talking to the other, grievances swamping us like a ‘snowpocalypse.’

In 2020, the survival kit metaphor takes on other dimensions as we come to the end of a year that has felt relentless and full of sorrow.

Gwendolyn Brooks understood the power of one raised voice to fight oppression and to speak truth to power—and as a Black woman in America, she had a huge stake in the notion that “We are each other’s harvest.”

In these divided times I am grateful for poems like this to remind us of good things we may have taken for granted before—like just “getting” to sit in an uncomfortable folding chair in a school auditorium—and of the experiences many of us have in common.

The hardest part of jury duty for me was being forbidden to talk about the trial until after our verdict. Writing poems months later helped restore the voice that had been silenced. —Kathleen McClung

“Know, Heart” ends in a place of utter desolation and loss, with the heart so baffled by suffering that it cannot feel anything or even conceive of a future. All it can do is look blindly back into memory.

The language of 'Citizen' is condensed and pungent, but the poem is book-length, and instead of capturing a single moment, it captures the million moments of alienation and annihilation that constitute black contemporary experience in America.

"After revisiting what I knew about lynching, reading more about it, and growing increasingly depressed, I knew that I would write this poem as a heroic crown of sonnets..." —Marilyn Nelson