Welcome to the relaunch of the Clifton House website. Here you will find work and words from diverse voices from our growing community.
May our support and celebration of the human experience inspire you to share your story, in your true and honest voice.
Please enjoy this excerpt from the foreword of how to carry water: selected poems of Lucille Clifton; edited and with foreword by Aracelis Girmay:
"No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to pen a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside it, I believe that inside the voices of many contemporary U.S. American poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity of her clear sight. There is the constellatory thinking where every thing is kin. The verbs of one body might also be the verbs of another seemingly disparate or distant body (her streetlights, for example, bloom.) And all things have agency: as the speaker of “august the 12th” mourns a distant brother on his birthday, the speaker’s hair cries, too (“my hair / is crying for her brother”). The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder – bearing witness to joy and too struggle."
Joy!
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