The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers

Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, among two score other works in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Walker offers a new poetry collection that is thematically of a piece with her previous writing. Her spirituality, concern for human rights, and almost old-fashioned, determined joyousness run deep, and her devoted readers will want to follow her as she turns "madness into flowers." Plain-spoken, plaintive, and not without witticism—one poem is titled "If I Was President ('Were' May Be Substituted by Those Who Prefer It")—these poems range from the Dalai Lama ("The Dalai Lama is Cool/ A modern word/ For/ 'Divine' ") to social and political concerns ("Racism dates us/ (Speciesism does too)") to personal reflection ("My desire/ is always the same; whenever Life/ deposits me; I want to stick my toe, & soon my whole body/ into the water").