Contents

Introduction

PROSE

Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1977)

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)

My Mother’s Mortar (1977)

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978)

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1979)

Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface (1979)

The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism (1981)

Fourth of July (1982)

I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (1985)

A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988)

Is Your Hair Still Political? (1990)

Difference and Survival: An Address at Hunter College (undated)

POETRY

from THE FIRST CITIES (1968)

A Family Resemblance

Coal

Now that I Am Forever with Child

Spring III

To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On

Father Son and Holy Ghost

Generation

If You Come Softly

Suffer the Children

A Lover’s Song

Suspension

from CABLES TO RAGE (1970)

Rooming houses are old women

Bloodbirth

Martha

Sowing

Making it

On a night of the full moon

from FROM A LAND WHERE OTHER PEOPLE LIVE (1973)

Progress Report

Moving Out or The End of Cooperative Living

Change of Season

Generation II

Love, Maybe

Conclusion

Movement Song

Who Said It Was Simple

from NEW YORK HEAD SHOP AND MUSEUM (1974)

New York 1970

The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Coon

A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I’m A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave

One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle

The Workers Rose On May Day Or Postscript To Karl Marx

Cables to Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time

Keyfood

To The Girl Who Lives In A Tree

Love Poem

Separation

Song For A Thin Sister

Revolution Is One Form Of Social Change

The Brown Menace Or Poem To The Survival of Roaches

Sacrifice

from BETWEEN OUR SELVES (1976)

Power

Solstice

Scar

Between Ourselves

from THE BLACK UNICORN (1978)

A Woman Speaks

Coniagui Women

Chain

Sequelae

A Litany for Survival

Portrait

Therapy

Recreation

Artisan

Contact Lenses

But What Can You Teach My Daughter

From Inside an Empty Purse

A Small Slaughter

Sister Outsider

“Never Take Fire from a Woman”

Between Ourselves

from CHOSEN POEMS: OLD AND NEW (1982)

The Evening News

Afterimages

A Poem For Women In Rage

from OUR DEAD BEHIND US (1986)

To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman

Outlines

Equal Opportunity

Diaspora

A Question of Climate

Florida

Political Relations

There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women

from THE MARVELOUS ARITHMETICS OF DISTANCE (1993)

Making Love to Concrete

Thaw

Inheritance—His

jessehelms

The Politics of Addiction

Today Is Not the Day

Notes

Prose Index

Poetry Index