Wisteria: Poems From The Swamp Country
by Kwame Dawes

Here are the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative force of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths.