Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems

by Cheryl Clarke

Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.



Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “ an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors

 

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

192 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2024

About the author

Cheryl L. Clarke is a lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist: she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Hobart, New York. With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is co-owner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a used and rare bookstore in Hobart.

Reviews

[Ada]

This was such a good overview of a very storied career. The selection combines joy and sensual verse with more hard-hitting pieces on the political climate and eulogizes some of the losses of all the decades Clarke’s writing encompasses. It was really interesting, talking with family members and mentors about Newark and New York before the turn of the millennium and shortly after while reading this - truly archives a cross section of experience. I liked how human focused the poems were. How they capture feeling.