The Language We Cry In: Poems by Delicia DanielsPoetry Discovery Prize Winner: 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award Stephen F. Austin University Press The Language We Cry In radiates an epic evolution. Constructing a lineage of discord from the beginning of our existence, this collection begins with The Testament of Lake Michigan. Embodied in the voice of an omniscient narrator, sacred energy breathes life into musicians, activists, civic citizens, and poets through a series of commandments. The spirits of distinctive leaders are called upon to combat this misery. A vigilant movement across the south begins. Separated by four momentous sections, each poem connects a human universal language of indecision, audacity, and devotion, taking the reader on a lyrical quest. Section One highlights manifestations of men whose bare hands and actions affirm their worth. Section Two extracts sympathy from sweat and sorrow through letters and confessions. Section Three tracks various faces of redemption including the mental state of military soldiers and battles with death. The final section observes rituals and matters of the heart that bring us to our knees and turn our heads towards a higher power with one question: When of Revolution.
|
|
Praise for The Language We Cry In
|
There is word celebration to be found in The Language We Cry In. The poetry of Delicia Daniels is witness to a new creation. She has given us a book worthy of high praise and genuflection. Here are poetic chronicles as beautiful as our many days of blackness.
E. Ethelbert Miller Recipient of the 2016 AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature |
The Language We Cry In is an ominous collection of tears and prayers in multiple conversations and many tongues blurring time and lives. Relentlessly soul stirring and compelling, in both framework and craft, the poems urge, beg, push, tug the reader into a gut-wrenching well of emotion and history, of lives lived. The substance of our history are the stories, blood and tears of real people. This fodder, in the deft and delicate hands of Delicia Daniels, stun and shimmer.
Quraysh Ali Lansana Editor of Revise The Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks |
Epic in scope, immediate in tone, encompassing a broad historical range yet always attentive to specific human detail, The Language We Cry In serves to both teach our minds and move our hearts. “We are hooked / hanging onto her harmony,” Delicia Daniels writes of Billie Holiday’s singing. Daniels’ readers will feel much the same about this powerful collection.
Joel Brouwer The University of Alabama Author of Off Message |