Wounded in the House of a Friend

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Beacon Press, 1995 - Poetry - 94 pages
Here, in her first book in eight years, Sonia Sanchez offers a powerful exploration of personal and shared pain. With passion and precision, Wounded in the House of a Friend confronts issues of rape, race, and gender and grapples with the assault of emotions spawned by betrayals of the mind and spirit - a husband's infidelity, a rape, a granddaughter's drug addiction, the divisions invoked by racism. But this collection is much more than an anatomy of wounds; it is a praise song to the spirit of all people, a testament to the hope that is rebuilt after each private apocalypse. With her mastery of haiku, narrative poetry, and African-American lyricism, Sanchez releases the voices of unspoken pain, transforming the wounds into a healing path of self-fulfillment and liberation, opening the way to a recognition of a new self and renewed self-worth.

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Contents

A Remembrance
31
Bullet Holes of Resistance
38
This Is Not a Small Voice
63
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Born in Alabama, educated in New York City, Sanchez is a leading poet of the Black Arts Movement, whose poetry is written from political, economic, and social concerns as well as literary ones. Although her literary focus has been primarily to express her experience as an African American woman, Sanchez claims, "if you write from a black experience, you're writing from a universal experience as well." Sanchez's poems are direct, colloquial, and often militant. Many of her works are for children, such as her "poems for young brothas and sistuhs," as she puts it in It's a New Day (1971). Yet she also writes with tenderness about love. As academic interest in the voices of women and African Americans has intensified, critical interest in and acceptance of Sanchez's work has increased.

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