hear your voice
a wild sea pausing in the wind

Few poets in history have possessed the irrepressible humanity and ‘abundant positivity’ that characterise 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. Whether it’s her iconic haiku, rhythmic ballads or devastating elegies, Sanchez’s lyric, luminous and ‘lovely as chandeliers’, thrums with a profound generosity and an international consciousness, rendering all of life’s agony and ecstasy.

This volume pulls from across 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 dextrous, and the musical – to celebrate her as one of the world’s most skilled and versatile poets of the past half century.