Sonia Sanchez at AWP this year

Prose Is Poetry

Sonia Sanchez’s 1984 poetry collection Homegirls and Handgrenades won an American Book Award the next year, though these years aren’t especially vivid for me. I was born in ‘83. Nonetheless, I read the collection with a degree of familiarity bubbling over in my mind, leaving my cheeks damp with tears. She is telling me about myself, about my experience and the people of and in this experience, this black experience. The content of Homegirls and Handgrenades is so familiar that this year’s reprint, its first, couldn’t be more appropriate.

In 88 pages, Sanchez lays out what Langston Hughes, in his essay “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” would call our “beautiful, and ugly too”—meaning that a black artist must be comfortable with all truths of black life. That as a people, we are both beautiful and ugly, and expressing this should not be feared or cause shame.

Sanchez’s smiling face covers Homegirls and Handgrenades. Beyond the cover is her range as a writer, displayed through poetic blues and haiku forms, free verse, and prose that is similar in sound to memoir. These literary mediums form the strong tie of the poet’s purpose; however, it is her prose that best illuminates the worlds of black love and life and the struggle to maintain the two.

Her prose is more than just words to associate with. There’s no sign that Sanchez has fallen into the all-too-common trap of being too poetic (fluff over meaning). She simply writes of people, people that have laughs and ways, have lived and have lessons. The ugly of it is how or where their living took them, and beautiful are the lessons, and joy even, in their living at all.

In the story “Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love,” Sanchez records her own vulnerability as a woman wanting to find love. She meets the 84-year-old Ms. Rosalie Johnson in a park. Ms. Johnson speaks to Sanchez about love, pretty men, and her second husband, William (she “wuz christen’ with his love”). Before the story ends, Sanchez is crying for herself and “all the women who ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.”

It is the beautiful construction and ugly truth of lines like that one that evoke a reader’s emotions. Her word choice is exceptional and unwavering; it is the result of what many poetry professor’s see as poetry’s number one rule: No images except in things.

She addresses teenage pregnancy through “Norma,” a girl from her childhood who was the brain in especially Algebra and French. Norma “laughed only with her teeth,” but with an education full of teachers lacking control over their students, her story is just as prevalent now as it was in the '80s. Idle hands and body: Norma, mother of four.

And there’s “Bubba,” the hustler, who Sanchez believes “gave his genius up to the times.” I could only read “Bubba” once initially; his story was too real. I closed my eyes and Sanchez’s words projected him onto the backs of my eyelids—yet another young black man caught up in the hustle, planting himself on a corner of the concrete jungle just to get ahead of his world, his ugly world.

But Homegirls and Handgrenades is not without hope, another reason its reprint is timely. In “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King,” Sanchez’s voice as a believer in all the beauty and ugly of her people shows through as vivid as a dream in color: “It was black in the universe before the sun; it was black in the mind before we opened our eyes; it was black in the womb of our mother; black is the beginning, and if we are the beginning we will be forever.” Her prose is poetry.