Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections. More about this author >
From the publisher:
The story of Toi Derricotte is a hero’s odyssey. It is the journey of a poetic voice that in each book earns her way to home, to her own commanding powers.
“I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory, finding a path through repressive forces to speak with both beauty and truth.
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five of Derricotte’s previously published books of poetry.
Toi Derricotte will not be content to be subsumed by any of the world she inhabits. Derricote’s “I”: New and Selected Poems quietly and persistently insists upon a personal hearing. Striking in its raw vulnerability, there is no performance here. Derricotte’s work is at once earnest and jarring, and dares to defy the conventions of culture and field drawing us into her worlds, opening our eyes.
