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A Daughter's Geography

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Ntozake Shange is most famous for her theatrical dance piece "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf." But this 1983 poetry collection shows her to be a powerful wordsmith as well: these poems evoke a childhood of intimate knowledge, an adulthood of anger and loss and the desire for change, and a lover who isn't about to take any more garbage from anybody. Shange's voice slips from a poetic tone to a street slang and back again smoothly and seamlessly. There are moments I will never forget in this collection: the opening trio of poems are a tribute to Duke Ellington, among others: when she says "it hasn't always been this way / ellington was not a street / robeson was no mere memory" I could feel the words strike me with the insistent lure of song referenced by its title: "Mood Indigo." As one of her lines says, "our doors opened like our daddy's arms," this collection will pull you in and make you feel the poet's world in a way few poets are capable of in this day of polite, obscure poetry.