The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010

“Who/ among us can imagine ourselves/ unimagined”? asks National Book Award winner Clifton, invoking “lost people” and “lost poems” that have fallen off the map into the mouths of dragons. The author of 18 children’s books as well as this substantial body of poems, Clifton (who died in 2010) imagined for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t—the racist, the incestuous father, the victim, the tired, the poor, the overlooked, the dead, and her own buried self. Here are all the poems she published during her lifetime, in books and in journals, as well as some unpublished material from her archives at Emory University. Like many of these pieces, “Black Women” is an exercise in conceptual and linguistic contrast that makes startling use of the neologism: “America made us heroines/ not wives./ We hid our ladiness/ to save our lives.” All the poems are filled with the people in Clifton’s life. “When you poem this,” says the speaker’s sister, a well-read prostitute, “remember the book of Job.” But to this dead sufferer she responds, “may heaven be filled/ with literate men/ may they bed you/ with respect.”