Synopses & Reviews
From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papps Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shanges words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
Review
Martin Gottfried New York Post These poems and prose selections are...rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal.
Review
William A. Raidy
L.I. Press/Newhouse Newspapers
Ntozake Shange's extraordinary "choreopoem"...is a dramatic elegy for black women with an undercurrent message for everyone. Its theme is not sorrow...but courage. Its strength is its passion and its reality....An unforgettable collage of one woman's view of the women of her race, facing everything from rape to unrequited love....Wisdom and naivete go hand in hand. Wounds and dream intermingle; strong passions melt into simple courage.
Synopsis
A movie-tie-in edition of Ntozake Shange's 1975 classic to coincide with the release of Tyler Perry's new movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
About the Author
Ntozake Shange, poet, novelist, playwright, and performer, wrote the Broadway-produced and Obie Award-winning For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She has also written numerous works of fiction, including Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, Betsy Brown, and Liliane.
Table of Contents
Contentspoems by title
dark phrases
graduation nite
now i love somebody more than
no assistance
i'm a poet who
latent rapists'
abortion cycle #1
sechita
toussaint
one
i used to live in the world
pyramid
no more love poems #1
no more love poems #2
no more love poems #3
no more love poems #4
somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
sorry
a nite with beau willie brown
a laying on of hands