Black Wings & Blind Angels: Poems
by Sapphire
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"Alive with the emotional honesty and intellectual force for which Sapphire has been admired as both a writer and a performance artist, these forty-seven poems take us into America's past and present, bearing testimony to the black experience in a country fragmented by war, racism, and urban and domestic violence. They tell the story of a search for the complicated spiritual path back to one's roots, a story of family, race, and self-transformation."--Jacket.Tags
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Sapphire has been exposed to the worst life has to offer, rape, abuse by men and women, the sight of black men abused, lynched by white people, incest, animal cruelty - and she spares no words in making sure the reader feels as much horror as possible. I can understand that discussing torment can be therapeutic for her, but it's far from healthy for the reader. I cringed at almost every poem. Sapphire is an artist, she has found a way to grow past her torment, but none of that growth is here. We get the horror with no indication of how to deal with it. All that being said, I would not have given this book only 2 stars, but for some unfathomable reason she feels the need to talk about Israeli settlers imposing the "final solution on show more Palestinians. Jew imposing the final solution on others. To me such wording was unforgivable. So, no, I won't recommend this book to anyone. show less
amazing heartbreaking heartmending. riveting enough to keep my attention while hanging out with little kids at the water park & also in the backseat of a long long car ride from North Carolina to Philadelphia. really one of the best books of poems i've read in a long time.
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5+ Works 4,673 Members
Sapphire was born Ramona Lofton in Fort Ord, California on August 4, 1950. She attended City College of New York and received her master's degree at Brooklyn College. Before starting her writing career, she worked as a performance artist and a teacher of reading and writing. Her works include the poetry collection American Dreams and the novel show more Push, which won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and the Mind Book of the Year Award in Great Britain. Precious, the film adaption of her novel Push, won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance (2009). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. In 2009, she was the recipient of a Fellow Award in Literature from United States Artists. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Languages
- English
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