“I” is a journey of enduring and vital love and joy, of sadness and anger, of incisive moral witness to America’s violence and racism, written by an “I” who “is the one I was most // True to.” Driven by a Detroit-born, soul base line like her Detroit peer Aretha Franklin, Derricotte’s voice is deeply infused with the deepest spiritual power. Her extraordinary “I” is our journey, too.”
–Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
“Derricotte’s poems push readers and practitioners into the hard work of seeing with rigor, intelligence, and grace. Her intellect and imagination continue to forge new territory in the field of poetry, challenging what we think a poem might be and what we think it might do in the world.” —Dan Chiasson, Aracelis Girmay & A. Van Jordan, PEN/Voelcker Award Citation
“Honest, fine-honed, deceptively simple. . . deadly accurate, ‘more merciless to herself than history,’ Toi Derricotte’s poems are as unique as her point of view. And it is the specificity, the fine observation of that viewpoint…which makes it at once accessible and revelatory to readers, whatever their origins, whatever their preconceptions of the possibilities of poetry.”
—Marilyn Hacker
