Cheryl Clarke

When I was taking undergraduate creative writing, I had the opportunity to hear Cheryl Clarke give a poetry reading. I know the exact date, October 18, 1990, because Ms. Clarke signed the copies of her books Living As a Lesbian and Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry that I purchased following her moving reading. I remember being bowled over by the power and lyrical beauty of her poetry and her delivery of it, and I eagerly read the books and enjoyed them. Somewhere in the boxes of notebooks I show more have squirreled away in my attack is probably the journal I used to keep and would have written about this poetry reading and the books I read afterwards.

A prompt in this year's Book Riot Reader Harder Challenge is "Read a book of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author." I thought immediately of Ms. Clarke's poetry books -- she is a Black lesbian -- so I snatched this one off the shelf last night, spent some time with each poem again. Still very powerful although less startingly fresh than they were in 1990, the year after they were published. I wish I could have evoked Ms. Clarke's delivery, the cadence of her expressive voice. I could almost hear an echo of it in "Ella Takes Up the Slack," which I remember as one of the poems she read that evening. Two of my favorites in the collection are "The Day Sam Cooke Died" and "Epic of Song." show less