Though she died in 2010, Lucille Clifton remains one of the most consequential poets in American literature. It requires only a few lines to understand her power. Clifton, a Buffalo native who spent years in Baltimore, chose clear, distilled language to articulate her meanings. “(T)hey ask me to remember,” she wrote in a 1987 poem, “but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine.” The work is titled “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” published in her collection “Next,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Yet until recently, discussions of her poetics remained scarce, even as her work traveled and unspooled through new generations. Enter the writer and editor Kazim Ali, who rigorously examined Clifton’s work in his book “Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton,” published by Rochester’s Boa Editions in 2024.  The title was a nod to both Clifton’s identity and hometown as well as an Indigenous historical figure of the same name. The book afforded Ali the platform to highlight Clifton as more than just a poet. “Lucille Clifton could be considered a philosopher and a theologian,” he said. “She’s also masterful in the art of poetry and prosody. But you don’t have to know all of those things to have these poems strike you.” Alma Thomas’ “Untitled (Music Series)” adorns the cover of Lucille Clifton’s “At the Gate.” Cover design by Sandy Knight. Credit: COURTESY OF BOA EDITIONS As Ali worked through Clifton’s deep archives at Georgia’s Emory University, he came across a trove of unpublished and uncollected works dating back to the late ‘80s. “It was kind of thrilling to find them,” he said. “There was this whole body of work that nobody had seen and that none of the scholars that worked on Lucille Clifton had seen and talked about.” The work will now be read widely, thanks to “At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987-2010,” a new book of Clifton’s verse, out April 14 via Boa Editions. It contains more than 70 poems from Clifton’s final two decades, revealing work that simply didn’t fit into her other published volumes. For Ali, “At the Gate” resumes a long-running discussion. “It’s like entering into this conversation about poetry, as well as the pleasure of enjoying new poems from a writer who we thought we were going to hear no more from,” he said. Ali also characterized some of the uncollected poems as occasionally “edgier” than the rest of Clifton’s work. One of them, “haiku,” dates back to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and expresses sympathy for the 32 murdered students and faculty as well as the shooter.  “(W)hat can we say to / their mothers / what can we say / to his mother,” the poem ponders. “It’s hard to say whether she would have just buried these poems or not,” Ali said. “She didn’t tend to do that. She tended to always work on things until she could bring it to a (final) version, and then she would eventually put it into a book.” As such, “At the Gate” reveals new depths to a poet that Toni Morrison once celebrated for her “astute, profound intellect.” By her own account, Clifton was an achieving daughter who traced her family’s roots back to slavery — and even further back, to Africa — and who grew into a celebrated and influential poet. But her beginnings were, by her own admission, as an acute observer and “a nervous child.” “I used to go to the black-market meat store during the war and it was always packed and I would lean on the counter and it seemed like I was going to faint and they would always wait on me before it was really my turn,” Clifton wrote in her 1976 poetic memoir, “Generations.” “At the Gate” spans previously uncollected and unpublished poems from the last two decades of Lucille Clifton’s life. Credit: PHOTO COURTESY OF BOA EDITIONS Such insights came from potent self-reflection. She synthesized religious stories with her own, giving her work an intrinsic complexity. Her economy of language yielded potent work; the introspective title poem of “At the Gate” finds a traveller coming upon “the door to tomorrow.” But on the page, the language was simple, often lowercase and short in length. Peter Conners, Boa Editions’ publisher and executive director, said this can present readers with a certain first impression. “It can come off almost as simplistic,” he said. “It can come off almost like, ‘gee, I think I could do that.’” But Clifton’s insights were singular. “The skill level that goes into writing something that translates to immediate connection — that’s where the magic happens,” Conners said. “At the Gate” marks Clifton’s 10th published work with Boa. The partnership began in 1987 when Clifton, then in her early 50s, released “Next” and “Good Woman”; both became Pulitzer finalists the following year. Her 2000 collection, “Blessing the Boats,” won the National Book Award for Poetry. Boa later launched its own “Blessing the Boats Selections” initiative, which publishes poetry collections by women writers of color. The occasion of a posthumous Lucille Clifton book — made all the more poignant by the fact that she died 16 years ago — warrants special treatment, Conners said. When the press put out Clifton’s collected works in 2012, the 800-page book was available in hardcover with a built-in cloth bookmark. Fittingly, it also came with a foreword by Morrison. The plan was to likewise publish “At the Gate” in hardcover editions. But Boa lost $35,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts last year. As a result, those plans were stifled. “We just didn’t have the extra money,” Conners said. “The most important thing is to get the work into the world in the most beautiful condition that we can and in a way that we are able to afford it. I will say, the paperback looks beautiful, but, you know, it’s not that.” Nevertheless, there will be a hardcover edition available for sale, he noted, without the “bells and whistles” that Boa originally planned to include. A sculpture inspired by Clifton titled “Spirit of Inspiration” was installed in downtown Buffalo in 2022. Credit: PHOTO BY NICK GRECO Just as Clifton’s relationship with Boa is its own historical document, Clifton’s verse throughout her career tended to evoke history, like the lineage of family. There’s Aunt Timmie, whose labor ironing the bedsheets of a “master poet” is also art. There’s her father, Samuel Sayles, who built railway couplers. But there’s also the Black history of Cynthia and Carol and Denise and Edy Mae, the little girls killed in a Baptist church fire bombing in 1963 Alabama. (“Four little birds shattered into skylarks,” Clinton writes.) There’s the lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas in 1998. That line of despicable violence also traces to a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, where a white supremacist gunman killed 10 Black people in 2022. The harrowing scene played out blocks from where Clifton grew up on nearby Purdy Street. There is all of this weight, and there is hope. In 2023, the City of Buffalo Art Collection dedicated a new sculpture titled “Spirit of Inspiration” near the downtown library. Created by visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous, the airy blue structure was inspired by Clifton and bears a few lines of her verse on its plaque. “(L)et love be / at the end,” it concludes. Ali said that as much as Buffalo shaped Clifton, it was Baltimore that supported her poetic leanings and “welcomed her and helped her build her life.” This is why “At the Gate” makes a perfect companion to “Black Buffalo Woman,” beginning with its cover artwork, a mosaic of red and white brush strokes. It’s a piece by the Black American painter Alma Thomas; the Memorial Art Gallery presented an exhibition of her vibrant work in 2025. Ali said Thomas and Clifton shared a Baltimore connection, but beyond that, the image seems to be in conversation with Clifton’s poems. “This painting expresses so much joy and beauty, and that’s what Lucille Clifton always is to me, despite the intensity and pain that’s sometimes expressed,” Ali said. “At the end of the day, there’s always this desire for more life and this commitment to joy.” The post A new posthumous collection adds dimensions to poet Lucille Clifton’s profound catalog appeared first on CITY Magazine. Arts. Music. Culture.. ...read more read less