Women's Voices For Change

These three Lucille Clifton poems are ones I love for their fresh, fierce, and sassy voice; compression; deceptively simple diction; rejection of punctuation and other conventions; humor and honesty; and above all, their joyous message of female empowerment, agency, and strength.

I wrote “Tree of Life” after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, to honor and grieve for my friend, Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, and the other beautiful souls who lost their lives that day.

Sometimes we rely on poetry as a sort of goad—to bear witness, expose evil or hypocrisy in others, or expose ourselves to ourselves.

The poems in 'Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl' paint their own murals in words glowing with passion and conviction. There is also a good dose of sass, a quality visually captured in book’s cover photo.

This poem draws attention to two convenient plot points. One is glibly introducing the death of a woman as a narrative catalyst; the other is the crisis of an anaphylactic reaction, invoked without any regard for the lived experience.

The poem speaks from the present, when climate disaster is incipient but not yet realized, when we still “did not know to fear” the sun. It poses images of lushness and life against those of aridity and death, allowing readers to draw their own inevitable conclusions about what we hope for our planet.

I chose “Dusk” by Tracy K. Smith for its frank expression of the double-edged sword that is motherhood (parenthood, really): We adore our children more than life itself, and if we do a good job of raising them, they one day will abandon us.

“The Path” may appear simple, but its ending moves me, every time. Fairy tale, love poem, ars poetica—“The Path” is all of these and more.