"At nineteen, the author's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

From sonnets and traditional ballads to free verses shot through with the syncopated attitude of blues, these poems tells the story of black women's work by the poet laureate and 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner.