Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems (Bluestreak)

Musically compelling, risky, original: yes. But the most salient characteristic of Sonia Sanchez's Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums is passion. There's enough erotic exuberance in these poems to make even Cupid blush, starting with the opening salvo: "you held me so close / we were like the singing coming off drums. / you made me squeeze muscles / lean back on the sound / of corpuscles sliding in blood. I heard my thighs singing." The intensity of Sanchez's love poetry can leave us breathless. Yet she is very much the public poet as well as the private one. Her collection includes tributes to such icons as Ella Fitzgerald, Tupac Amaru Shakur, Toni Cade Bambara, Cornel West, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Sanchez also produces a portrait of an HIV-positive woman, which builds to an affirmative crescendo:

...I ammmmmmmm
the universe knows that
I ammmmmmm
hiv positive but I ammm
still. woman. lover. mother.
sistah. artist. organizer. activist.
woman...

At her best, Sanchez bridges gender, age and race, speaking in the closest we can expect to a universal language. We read the poems in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums and know exactly what she means. --Martha Silano