Kwame Dawes Quotes

This poet is a griot in search of a village.

If you wait long enough, all murders
will have lost their scream, all bloodlines
forgotten, all dynamite broken, all storms
settled, all bones cleaned of the memory of sin.

I am listening to the wind,
to the voice in the wind telling me
to write it all down. So I do.

With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement.

A lot of people say they want to leave this city to go somewhere else. Not me. I love this place for what it is. Ugly and pretty. Rough and tender. Chaotic and smooth. Loving and murderous. All of it.