This Is Not a Small Voice: Selected Poems

‘The poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power and yet always clean and uncluttered. It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions, and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly and so well’ Chinua Achebe ‘Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty’ Isabel Allende ‘A lion in literature’s forest’ Maya Angelou A dazzling selection of poems from one of the most beloved American poets, whose distinctive verse resonates around the globe 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.