Full Description
Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke's illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.
Clarke's poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, "Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance" and "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community" revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature's Black Women literary warriors.
Contents
Targets 2019
History
On Their Way to Life
Targets
Emergency Surgery
depth in a two dimensional space
What It Take
Brief Interval /
Legacy/Legends Nephew 2016
lipstick corn
What Does It Mean?
Woman Ends Her Life: Elegy
Tercet
Reckless Domesticity
Living as a lesbian in the archive of style
Juanita' (for D.C.)
By My Precise Haircut 2016
Mandela: 12-15-2013
A Capital Car Chase
Women of Letters
Oh, Memory Fatal and Fateful
A Sister's Lament . . .
Songs of Longing
the empire
A Child Die
The Days of Good Looks: Prose And Poetry 1980-2000 (2005)
Living as a lesbian underground, fin de siÈcle
Billie Holiday
Dreams of South Africa
james dean longing
Experimental Love (1993)
War Crazy Men
Greta Garbo Movement
passing
All Souls' Day
Flowers of Puerto Rico Buttons
An Epitaph
Rondeau
Make-up
Remember the Voyage
Arroyo Querida
Hard
Living as a Lesbian at 45
Najeeb (1974-1989)
Veronica Ashley Wood, My Niece
Hanging Tough in the Persian Gulf: Elegy
an old woman muses from her basement
A Poet's Death
Humid Pitch (1989)
Bulletin
The Day Sam Cooke Died
Sisters Part
party pants (from Epic of Song)
Frances Michael
Erol
Ilona of Hickory
No Place
Living As a Lesbian (1986)
14th Street
wearing my cap backwards
The woman who raised me
living as a lesbian on the make
journal entry: sisters
for my mother, 1979
palm leaf of Mary Magdalene
I come to the city
freedom flesh
Indira
no more encomiums
Intimacy no luxury
Vicki and Daphne
Fall journal entry: 1983
nothing
sexual preference
Miami: 1980
living as a lesbian underground a futuristic fantasy
an exile I have loved
sister of famous artist brother
Pueblo Bonito
jazz poem for Morristown, N.J.
Intimacy no luxury
marimba
Kittatinny
living as a lesbian at 35
Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women 1982
hair: a narrative
Mavis writes in her journal
The Older American
Fathers
April 4, 1968: Washington, D.C.
The moon in cancer
Gail
the johnny cake
Of Althea and Flaxie
NEW POEMS
Foreword to New Poems
Grade Schooler Scholar Jo'burg, 2016
Never Any Proof Entry
Back seat
Juggernaut
Betty Carter (1929-1998)
The message Cost
Signs of the Times Sandy Bland
Sonnet for the Last Night Spring 2022
journal entry
Emanuel 9 2015: their influence was wide
Acknowledgements
