Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey-a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. "I": New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy.It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
"'I' offers Derricotte a bit of Thoreau's doubleness, a chance to stand outside of her impressive body of work and view it anew. Thus the writer, much like the reader, has a fresh experience of 'All the years / of fear and raging / in my poems, the years I continued / in thankless silence - until I was empty / of it...'"
