A daughter's geography. [Hardcover]

Ntozake Shange (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Unknown (January 1, 1983)
• ASIN: B002O5EQHC
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

More About the Author

Ntozake Shange, poet, novelist, playwright, and performer, wrote the Broadway-produced and Obie Award-winning For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She has also written numerous works of fiction, including Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, Betsy Brown, and Liliane.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry that matters, August 2, 2000

By 

Robert James (Culver City, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Daughter's Geography (Paperback)

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.