The Homeplace

Marilyn Nelson Waniek’s third collection of poems, The Homeplace, shows her many talents to great advantage. Waniek is crisply intelligent and keen in discipline. She is a teller of family tales whose black roots in the South quickly embrace us all. Maybe best, Waniek has the full range of a blues singer’s passion, from bitterness to joy, and she shows why in the right hands poetry’s cry of the heart is still strong and still fresh. Bless Marilyn Nelson Waniek for her poems! ~Dave Smith

This is a book whose good humor, grace, and dignity clothe the naked power of truth telling. Waniek limns her characters, who are also her foremothers and forefathers, with a novelist’s sleight of hand and a poet’s precision and music. The stories she recounts, and the elegance and wit with which she recounts them, even the purgatorial episodes of slavery, segregation, and war, are equally revelatory. ~Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with an inimitable ratio of wit to terror, indignation to jubilance. She may well have the most wicked timing in poetry today. Her narratives needed to be told; her sonnets are indelible in issue and in technique. In The Homeplace, as quest turns to revelation, over a century of vibrant, often triumphant African-American lives are released into art. Required, exhilarating reading. ~Sandra McPherson

Marilyn Waniek knows what family history means—we’re all strange and all related. This is our life, a reader in the happy thrall of these fine poems understands. ~William Matthews