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Sonia Sanchez is an award-winning poet, activist, scholar, and formerly the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University, and is currently a poet-in-residence there. She is the author of sixteen books, including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Shake Loose My Skin, and Morning Haiku.
One of our more overlooked older poets, Sanchez writes concise, wounded poems that work on the page as well as aloud. A tragedy of sorts written in terse terza rima, this short narrative poem mourns the poet's half-brother's death from AIDS. Borrowing techniques from Greek tragedy and African ritual storytelling and song, it has a section for each speaker: sister, brother, father, and chorus of ancestors. Permeated with the pain of abandonment--the abandoner's, as well as the victim's--the poem is a road map for the disintegrating family: 'this father always a guest/ never a permanent resident of my veins/ always a traveler to other terrains.' It fades into disembodied voices at the end, the brother's death being one terminus of the ancestral line. But it is the ancestors who offer strength and permanence because they have turned suffering into a stoical wisdom. Interesting and moving. -- Library Journal <br> Well-versed jazz fans will recognize the tit
