These poems are powerful in their dynamism, in their rhythm and flow. But their impact is manifest most in the combination of their immediacy and historical depth. The soul-crushing frustration of watching the police murder Alton Sterling is juxtaposed against Douglass’s vision of slavery, or McKay’s Harlem Renaissance, or Baraka’s Black Arts Movement.
In A Mandala of Hands, John Warner Smith crafts poems of patient and painstaking wisdom, poems that lead the reader deliberately into an array of vantages, laboring hard to leaven inquiry with insight. At the heart of this book's mosaic approach beats a steady quest for recovery and repair.
Poetry. African & African American Studies.