Daniell started out as a poet who wrote lyrical verse on nature with such titles as "Green Frogs" and "Black Animals." Between those innocent lyrical beginnings, which served largely to hone Daniell's mastery of her craft, and her volumes of noteworthy fiction and nonfiction, A SEXUAL TOUR OF THE DEEP SOUTH stands as a singular explosive event in the corpus of her work.

Crackling with the energies of self-liberation via a sudden focused expansion of consciousness, it is a uniquely significant document in the canon of womanist literature. Much of the imagery and details in A SEXUAL TOUR OF THE DEEP SOUTH are not for the mild-hearted or overly sensitive. The contents of the poetry swing back and forth between the erotically exceptional and the downright raunchy. One might nearly have expected Baudelaire to compose these poems had he been a politically informed Southern woman writing in the 1960s. Whereas the book can be read with real pleasure on its more graphic levels, it assumes a deeper meaning when the erotic is accepted as a metaphor for the individual claiming all rights to her own being.

Aberjhani
author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY
and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE ( )