Homegirls and Handgrenades

Winner of the American Book Award

A classic of the Black Arts Movement brought back to life in a refreshed edition

“A lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”—Maya Angelou

Originally published in 1984, this collection of prose, prose poems, and lyric verses is as fresh and radical today as it was then. Sonia Sanchez, the premiere poet of the Black Arts Movement, shows the “razor blades” in clenched in her teeth in these powerful pieces.

ISBN-13: 9780807012956

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Beacon Press

Publication Date: 03-21-2023

Pages: 112

Product Dimensions: 5.34(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.32(d)

Series: Celebrating Black Women Writers #8

Poet, playwright, educator, and activist Sonia Sanchez is the author of seventeen books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions? Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin and most recently, Collected Poems. Among hundreds of honors she has received are the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. Homegirls & Handgrenades won the 1985 American Book award, and Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sonia Sanchez has taught and lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Australia, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Norway, Canada, and the People’s Republic of China. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English until her retirement in 1999.

Table of Contents

THE POWER OF LOVE

Poem No. 10
Welcome Home, My Prince
After the Fifth Day
Haiku
Story
Haiku
“Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love”

BLUES IS BULLETS

Poem Written After Reading Wright’s “American Hunger”
Blues
Norma
Depression
Ballad
To All Brothers: From All Sisters
Poem No. 12
A Song
After Saturday Night Comes Sunday

BEYOND THE FALLOUT

Bluebirdbluebirdthrumywindow
Haiku
I Have Walked a Long Time
Kaleidoscope
On Passing thru Morgantown, Pa.
Masks
On Seeing a Pacifist Burn
Traveling on an Amtrak Train Could Humanize You

GRENADES ARE NOT FREE

Bubba
A Poem for Paul
From a Black Feminist Conference
Haiku
A Letter to Ezekiel Mphahlele
Reflections After the June 12th March for Disarmament
A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King
MIAS

About the Author