At the Gate

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA, 2000), won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman (BOA), and Next (BOA). Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.

“This fresh brush with Clifton’s voice is nothing shy of a miracle—like a visitation from the other worlds the mighty poet herself taught so many of us to believe were real. And Kazim Ali’s meticulous framing of the drafts, variants and references making up these uncollected poems is a glorious window into how one of the essential voices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made and understood her work.” —Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States“At the Gate is an astonishing concentration of language opened, attended to, dreaming. Sharpening into clarity, whispering, raging, shifting—line to line, poem to poem—across planes, these poems are traces of Black feminist paths to relation. How we have needed them. And so it feels miraculous that a new book of Lucille Clifton’s poems should come to us now. In profound and ongoing attunement with Clifton’s oeuvre, scholar, poet, and editor Kazim Ali brings to us an essential text by one of the great practitioners of our time.” —aracelis girmay, author of the black maria“Clifton’s earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual.”—Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times“Open up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words.”—Danez Smith, The Week