Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

Front Cover
New World Library, Sep 10, 2010 - Poetry - 184 pages
Alice Walker is beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others. Here she confronts personal and collective challenges in words that dance, sing, and heal. As Shiloh McCloud describes in her foreword, Walker's poems contain “the death of loved ones and the birth of new ideas, the sorrow of rejection and the deliciousness of love, the sweetness of home, familial abandonment, and what it means to belong to the greater world family.” As Walker writes in her preface, the “empty” half of a glass holds “a rainbow that could exist only in the vacant space.” Musing on the role of dance, which gives this collection its title, she writes, “though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”

About the author (2010)

Alice Walker is known throughout the world as a prize-winning fiction writer, an activist for the rights of all humans, an essayist, and as a woman who will speak her mind no matter what the cost. Much beloved and renowned for the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winning novel The Color Purple, Walker has since written several books of poetry as well as books of essays and fiction. She is no stranger to sorrow or hard times, yet she continues to go to all corners of the world to shed light on topics too often hidden. Her talent as a writer brings these topics to the attention of the world, helping to not only start the conversation but mobilize the world to help and heal. Alice Walker lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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