Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Bluestreak Book 12)

An extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of work, From a leading writer of the Black Arts Movement and the American Poetry Society'\u2019s 2018 Wallace Stevens Award–winner.Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-\u2013winning Sonia Sanchez.

Read more From Publishers Weekly Mapping out an education that starts with a \"Homecoming\"?I have been a/ way so long/ once after college/ I returned tourist/ style to watch all/ the niggers killing/ themselves\"and arrives at a \"Love Poem\" that asks, \"where are the fathers/ strutting their furlined/ intellect bowing their/ faces in the crotch/ of academia," Sanchez avoids many of the poetic pitfalls that an explicit political agenda can entail.

This gathering, including work from six previous collections, highlights Sanchez'\u2019s range: prose poems investigate disenfranchised lives, from a lover strung out on dope to a hate-\u2013crime victim whose home has been spray-painted with the predictably horrifying epithets, while lyrics move down the page in sinewy lines that seem to pluck living speech from air.

But it is love, or the lack therof, that is at the heart of the book.