Chasing Utopia -- A Short Essay Affirming Why -- If a Lemon -- Podcast for Bicycles -- Why I Wrote The Grasshopper's Song -- My Sister and Me -- Spices -- The Other Place -- The Lioness Circles Her Brood in New Orleans -- The Right Way -- Spring Blooms -- The International Open -- The Giggle Bank -- Kick Stretch Kick -- Mrs. Scott -- Where Did the Night Go -- It's Just Love -- Still Life with Apron -- One Thing -- And Everyone Will Answer -- Day Pass to Heaven -- My Dream -- Artichoke Soup -- On Knoxville, TN -- Affirming My Birth Date -- The American Vision of Abraham Lincoln -- I Am at That Point -- I Hate Mondays -- A Song for a Blackbird -- Icarus -- When the Girl Became a Poet -- When God Made Mountains -- These Women -- Cooking with Mommy -- What the Fly on the Wall Overheard -- Fear: Eat In or Take Out? -- Biscuits: Dropped or Baked -- Poets -- For Mark Dressman -- Postcards -- In Defense of Flowers -- Werewolf Avoidance -- Exercise -- I Communicate -- The Lone Ranger Rides the Lonesome Trail Again -- For Runaway Slaves -- My Diet -- Nickels for Nina -- Blues for Roanoke -- The Spotlight in the Sky -- The Spider Waltz -- I Wish I Could Live (in a Book) -- I Wish I Could Live (in Music) -- I Wish I Could Live (in a Painting) -- Don Pullen -- Making a Perfect Man -- When My Phone Trembles -- Still Life with Crying Girl -- Robert Champion -- Allowables -- Flying in Kigali -- Terezin -- To the Lion Who Discovered a Deer in His Habitat: Give Him Ketchup! -- The Significance of Poetry -- Note to the South: You Lost -- The Golden Shovel Poem -- Morgantown, WVA -- For Sonia Sanchez -- For Haki Madhubuti -- Our Job Safety Is Your Priority with Coffee -- The Brown Bookshelf -- Interior Vision -- I Give Easily -- People Who Live Alone -- Before You Jump -- You Gave Her Something -- Thirst -- The Scared and the Vulnerable
Summary:
Overview: Nikki Giovanni's poetry has spurred movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a healer and as a national treasure. But Giovanni's heart resides in the everyday, where family and lovers gather, friends commune, and those no longer with us are remembered. And at every gathering there is food--food as sustenance, food as aphrodisiac, food as memory. A pot of beans is flavored with her mother's sighs--this sigh part cardamom, that one the essence of clove; a lover requests a banquet as an affirmation of ongoing passion; homage is paid to the most time-honored appetizer: soup.
