Collected Poems

A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career.

Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work, including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969), through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse, from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation, social equality, and women’s rights is evident throughout, as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults.

As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”

Available from:

Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Beacon Press, Amazon

Morning Haiku

This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach “exploding in the universe,” the “blue hallelujahs” of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta “thundering out of the earth.” Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns “words into gems”: Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning.

There are intimate verses here for family and friends, verses of profound loss and silence, of courage and resilience. Sanchez is innovative, composing haiku in new forms, including a section of moving two-line poems that reflect on the long wake of 9/11. In a brief and personal opening essay, the poet explains her deep appreciation for haiku as an art form. With its touching portraits and by turns uplifting and heartbreaking lyrics, Morning Haiku contains some of Sanchez’s freshest, most poignant work.

“Sanchez’s haiku is as simple and clear as breathing, but with everything that brings energy and vivacity to being alive.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books

Does Your House Have Lions?

With unrelenting honesty and searing beauty, one of our most powerful voices offers us an African-American odyssey. Does Your House Have Lions? is an exquisite and at times wrenching work exploring the life of Sonia Sanchez’s brother—a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city’s gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic.

Sanchez describes her brother’s alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voice of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain.

This brave epic poem shatters silences surrounding gay sexuality in African-American families and imagines the possibility of reconciliation and love. It offers a meditation on the living meanings of journey, life, and death—an opportunity for all of us to find a way home.

Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems

In the movie lovejones, in Vibe magazine, and in rapper D Knowledge’s CD, Sonia Sanchez’s love poems have put into words the passions of a generation.

Now, here is a collection of new love poems from Sonia Sanchez. In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sanchez writes as no one else can of the many forms love takes: burning, dreamy, disappointed, and vulnerable. In three sections—Naked in the Streets, Shake Loose My Skin, and In This Wet Season—she takes us from the most intimate landscapes of passion to its public celebration in love poems dedicated to icons of our age, including Tupac Shakur and Ella Fitzgerald.

Homegirls and Handgrenades

“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.” —Isabel Allende

This new edition of Homegirls and Handgrenades draws together all Sanchez’s poems of the 1980’s including the original collections of Homegirls and Handgrenades .