Does Your House Have Lions?

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Beacon Press, 1997 - AIDS (Disease) - 70 pages
Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez's brother - a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city's gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother's alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain. This brave epic poem shatters silences surrounding gay sexuality in African-American families and imagines the possibility of reconciliation and love. It offers a meditation on the living meanings of journey, life, and death - an opportunity for all of us to find a way home.

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About the author (1997)

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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