The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton brings together the published poetry of the American poet Lucille Clifton, who served as Poet Laureate of Maryland and won the National Book Award. This volume, published in 2012 after her death, gathers work from across her career, along with previously uncollected poems. Clifton wrote in a spare, direct style, often using lowercase letters and short lines to deliver poems of striking force. Her subjects include family, motherhood, African American history and identity, the female body, illness, faith, and survival. Drawing on her own life and on figures from Black history and the Bible, she combined plainspoken language with emotional and political depth. The collection allows readers to follow the development of one of the most distinctive American voices of the late twentieth century in a single, comprehensive volume.
What you might want to know about The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A career-spanning gathering of the poems of Lucille Clifton, known for her spare, powerful work on family, race, and the body.
She wrote spare, direct poems, often in lowercase, on family, African American identity, the body, faith, and survival.
Yes. She won the National Book Award for Poetry and served as Poet Laureate of Maryland.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton was written by Lucille Clifton, published in 2012 by BOA Editions.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is 769 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton takes most readers 12 to 17 hours to finish.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
