Terrible Stories

Overall, I am glad to have made the choice to read this anthology. My love for poetry was stemmed by authors like Robert Frost, because I could get lost in the poems about nature and rural life, and family matters. That was literature I could relate to and feel comfortable in. Making the leap to an anthology written by an African-American woman about mostly feminine and racial issues opened me to a whole new way to experience poetry. There were few things I could relate to, and much of the time I found myself saying, "what the heck is she talking about?" Clifton makes many subtle historical references and leaves them unexplained, giving all the more power to those lines when read and understood. For me it made for a great learning experience, because I had to look up what all those references meant to understand the poems. Clifton taught me about slavery, segregation, womanhood, cancer, the Bible and her life. I couldn't see myself in the text, which I usually prefer, but I sure did see a world different from my own.