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.

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.

It will help, the poem seems to suggest, if we focus on family and the world of nature rather than the world of the human. Some aspects of that world are just too unbearable right now for a sustained gaze.

“Ink on Paper” seems to prioritize unarticulated feeling over rational thought and movement and communication over holding things tightly and trying to preserve  their physical manifestations.

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

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.

One strength of today’s poem, though, is that it works even for readers not familiar with that infamous case involving a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious young woman behind a dumpster. Even before #metoo, sexual assaults like this are common enough, unfortunately, that readers will get the gist.