This Is Not a Small Voice

"A lion in literature’s forest"—Maya Angelou
A dazzling selection of poems from one of the most beloved American poets, whose distinctive verse resonates around the globe

Few poets in history have possessed the irrepressible humanity and abundant positivity that characterize Sonia Sanchez’s astonishing body of work.

Energetic, infectious and rich with sonic exuberance, Sanchez’s poems have radically transformed the direction of American poetry over the past six decades and have been an inspiration to readers around the world, including Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. Whether it’s her iconic haiku, rhythmic ballads or devastating elegies, Sanchez’s luminous verse thrums with a profound generosity and an international consciousness, rendering all of life’s agony and ecstasy.

This volume draws on Sanchez’s diverse repertoire to showcase the multiplicities of the poet’s voice—the profound and personal, the firebrand and socially conscious, the playful and formally dexterous, and the musical—to celebrate her as one of the world’s most skilled and versatile poets of the past half century.Under a Soprano Sky
Fragment 1
Fragment 2
This Is Not a Small Voice
Story
Sequences
City Songs
Poem Written After Reading Wright’s ‘American Hunger’
At the Gallery of La Casa de Las Americas, Habana. Dec. 1984
A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald
Poem No. 10
Ballad
Poem No. 7
Fall
Philadelphia: Spring, 1985
When we come
From a Black Feminist Conference Reflections on Margaret Walker: Poet
to CHucK
a ballad for stirling street (to be sung)
personal letter no. 3
a poem for my father
insomnia
A Poem for Paul
Past
Why / Poem No. 1
July
Father and Daughter (I)
poem at thirty
Depression
(section 1)
Does Your House Have Lions?
On Seeing a Pacifist Burn
malcolm
An Anthem
in the courtroom
MIAS
A Love Song for Spelman
Father and Daughter (II)
haikuography
Haiku / After the fifth day
Haiku / Haiku
10 haiku
15 haiku
9 haiku
6 haiku
Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman
personal letter no. 2

Acknowledgments“You have spoken for us . . . Written for us . . . Sung to us . . . How much in your debt we are.”
—Toni Morrison

“The poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power. . . . It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions, and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly.”
—Chinua Achebe

“Her commanding oeuvre continues to elevate language’s ability to give voice to entire communities (their daily pleasures and pains) inside our shared and troubled history.”
—Claudia Rankine

“Her songs of destruction and loss scrape the heart; her praise songs thunder and revitalize. We need these songs for our journey together into the next century.”
—Joy HarjoSonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, educator, activist, and one of the founders of the Black Arts movement. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Does Your House Have Lions?, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Homegirls & Handgrenades, which won an American Book Award. She has also received many other awards including the Robert Creeley Award, the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in Philadelphia.