Drive — Hettie Jones

Poetry. African American Studies. Jones is known best for her resonant memoir about the beat milieu and her marriage to Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), but this collection of poems, her first, will establish her as a potent and fearless poet. The provocative multiplicity of meanings embodied by the title bears beautiful fruit, beginning with a strikingly original set of poems about cars and the road, including 'Hard Drive' in which Jones saucily introduces herself as both 'woman enough to be moved to tears / and man enough / to drive my car in any direction.' She does drive in any and all directions over the course of the book, writing both deeply personal and strongly political poems, all of which are utterly free of sentimentality yet warm with compassion. Jones writes 'I love / everyone today, as usual,' and it is her embracing of life, and its mirror image, death, that revs each poem up to speed, liberating us, for a sweet moment, from inertia--Donna Seaman, Booklist.