Alice Walker has always turned to poetry to express some of her most personal and deeply felt concerns. She has said that her poems-even the happy ones-emerge from an accumulation of sadness, when she stands again "in the sunlight." "(This collection) has two fine strengths-a music that comes along sometimes, as sad and cheery as a lonely woman's whistling-and Miss Walker's own tragicomic gifts" (New York Times Book Review).

"This is Alice Walker's fourth volume of verse and her first since she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color PurpleUsing short, nonmetrical lines, these simple lyrics meditate on love and lovers, Afro-Amer-ican experience and heritage, Walker's own family past, women, Indians, hunger, the Third World, and poetry itself.'I understand how poems are made,' she tells us, and perhaps she does, but the poems assembled here seem more posed and self-conscious than those of her powerful first volume Once (1968) in which she successfully combined detached observation, emotional urgency, and understatement. Here many of the poems read more like exercises than necessary utterances." Reviewed by Robert Jackson, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)