When one reads Sonia
Sanchez, one knows the state of black America.
~ Linda Duggins, Host of Talking Books from QBR (New York based radio program)
|
Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) is a prolific writer, serious, and original. Her poems depict the struggles between black people and white people, between men and women, and between cultures. She is innovative in her use of language and structure, sometimes using Black speech in her poetry. She too has a brilliant sense of history, and a vision of her people being truly free. "right on: white america" is one of her best poems. America, she writes, was once 'a pio/neer land', but it had systematically eliminated through intolerance all those that it saw different. Thus, "there ain't ./no mo/ indians', 'no mo real/white allamerican/bad/guys. The only ones left now are the black people and they had better 'check out', for the guns and shells are falling to decimate them and a bleak future awaits them unless they do something about it. (bio excerpted from: http://www.americansc.org.uk/samuel.htm) Sanchez is a recent recipient (2001) of the Robert Frost medal in poetry. One of the highest honors awarded to a nationally recognized poet. One of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement; Sanchez is the author of sixteen books and lives in Philadelphia.
|
Homegirls and Handgrenades
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 1893996808
Pub. Date: April 2007
Format: Paperback, 96pp
Publisher: White Pine Press NY
A reprint of Sonia Sanchez's award-winning collection, which contains some of her seminal work.Winner of the American Book Award
This book is another expression of the continuing creativity of Sonia Sanchez. Some pieces are plaintive and poignant, others are tough and militant, but all are significant, brilliant and original. Here again is another example of Black speech, a vernacular familiar to all who know and love this author's previous work. - Margaret Walker
Full
Moon of Sonia
Listen to samples from all tracks
"Full Moon of Sonia" is a celebration of the life and work of a cultural
icon and national treasure of Sonia Sanchez, affectionately and deservedly
known as the "Poet Laureate of the Planet". It fuses a wide range of musical
styles with the poetry of Sonia Sanchez in a groundbreaking CD that
underscores Ms. Sanchez' contribution to poetry and performance in the 20th
century. Further, Ms. Sanchez' unique performance style serves as a reminder
of her impact on the oral tradition in African-American literature.
Her influence is far-reaching and wide ranging and can be heard in such
artists as Mos Def, Jill Scott, Talib, Rakin, to name a few. She has been a
guest artist on albums with greats such as Diana Ross and has collaborated
with such artists as Eric Benet. Her latest album, the first in 25 years,
reflects a diverse offering of musical and poetic styles that spans R&B,
Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Gospel, and Hip-Hop. This breakthrough CD marks a new
plateau in a career that stretches over four decades. On this CD, Ms.
Sanchez has assembled some of the finest composers, musicians, and vocalists
working in music today.
"Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest...This world is a better
place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more
manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their
lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry."
- Maya Angelou
Shake
Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
Click to order via
Amazon
Publisher: Beacon Press
Date Published: December 1998
Format: Trade Cloth
Coming on the heels of Sanchez's 1998
nominations for both the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP Image Awards, Shake
Loose My Skin covers over thirty years of work and is a testament to her literary,
sensual, and political powers. Sanchez combines an ear for the rhythms of street speech
with a sophisticated formal repertoire. She shifts with ease from a blues-inspired love
poem to a political call to arms. She is a master of haiku, tanka, and even villanelle,
but constantly reconstructs these and other forms with her unique poetic vision. Her world
is one of hardship, violence, and oppression, but it is also one of passion, fortitude,
and tenderness.
Like
the Singing Coming off the Drums : Love Poems
Click to order via Amazon
Publisher: Beacon Press
Date Published: January 1998
Format: Trade Cloth
Synopsis
A collection of sensual love poems from one of the most prominent African-American poets
and a leader of the Black Arts Movement.
Here is a collection of new love poems from Sonia Sanchez. In haiku,
tanka, and sensual blues, Sanchez writes of the many forms love takes:
burning, dreamy, disappointed, and vulnerable. In three sections - Naked in
the Streets, Shake Loose My Skin, and In This Wet Season - she takes us from
the most intimate landscapes of passion to its public celebration in love
poems dedicated to icons of our age, including Tupac Shakur and Ella
Fitzgerald..
Does
Your House Have Lions
Click to order via Amazon o
Publisher: Beacon Press
Format: Hardcover & Paperbackr
Publication Date: April 1997
Did You Know?
Does Your House Have Lions, is written in rhyme
royal. This is a form that not many writers can tackle at all, much less tell a story
-- by writing dozens of verses in the structure while altering the form to create
characters with different speech patterns and tones.
Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez's brother
- a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in
the city's gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of
the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother's alienation from his family and
his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in
the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the
story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared
history of loss, separation, and pain. This brave epic poem shatters
silences surrounding gay sexuality in African-American families and imagines
the possibility of reconciliation and love. It offers a meditation on the
living meanings of journey, life, and death - an opportunity for all of us
to find a way home.
Wounded
in the House of a Friend
ISBN: 0807068276
Format: Paperback, 128pp
Pub. Date: April 1997
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Here, in her first book in eight years, Sonia Sanchez offers a powerful
exploration of personal and shared pain. With passion and precision, Wounded in
the House of a Friend confronts issues of rape, race, and gender and grapples
with the assault of emotions spawned by betrayals of the mind and spirit - a
husband's infidelity, a rape, a granddaughter's drug addiction, the divisions
invoked by racism. But this collection is much more than an anatomy of wounds;
it is a praise song to the spirit of all people, a testament to the hope that is
rebuilt after each private apocalypse. With her mastery of haiku, narrative
poetry, and African-American lyricism, Sanchez releases the voices of unspoken
pain, transforming the wounds into a healing path of self-fulfillment and
liberation, opening the way to a recognition of a new self and renewed
self-worth.
Homegirls and
Handgrenades: Poems
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 1560251433
Format: Paperback, 77pp
Pub. Date: September 1997
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
Edition Description: REPRINT
Edition Number: 2
In a style that is hers alone, Sonia Sanchez brings politics and poetry together
as she passionately relates scenes from the lives of poor blacks. "Sanchez is a
remarkable writer . . . this is s book in which the whole adds up to far more
than the parts."
Home Coming
Click to order via
Amazon
First book published by Sanchez.
"Sanchez became swept up in the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s.
Her first two collections of poetry, Home Coming (1969) and We a BaddDDD People
(1970), reflect her militant, antiwhite stance, inspired in part by the example
of Malcolm X. She incorporates dialect and profanity into her pithy, biting
poems, and the tone is usually combative. Sanchez unleashed some of her rage at
America's Anglocentric educational system. Her criticisms, however, were
followed by suggestions, and she has become a powerful advocate of black studies
programs."
�Black American Women Fiction Writers (Writers of English: Lives and Works),
Harold Bloom, ed., 1995.
Jazz
Poetry Kafe (Poetry/Jazz/Spoken Word CD)
Executive Producer: Kwame Alexander (Contributors Include: Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Fertile Ground, wadud, Tony Medina, and many more.)
Sister Sanchez is also included on the Jazz Poetry Kafe: The BlackWords Compilation CD http://aalbc.com/poet/jazz.htm
Related Links
Sonia Sanchez and Ten Grandmothers Acquitted of "Defiant Trespassing" by
Jamie Walker
http://reviews.aalbc.com/sonia_sanchez_acquited.htm
Sonia Sanchez Performs �Full Moon� Concert in NYC by Jamie Walker
http://reviews.aalbc.com/fullmoon.htm
Sacred Circle/Spoken Word Conference
http://events.aalbc.com/spoken.htm
Sanchez photos by Troy Johnson, Founder AALBC.com
