If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.