How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton

By Lucille Clifton and Aracelis Girmay

First printing: 10,000 hardcover copies.

How to Carry Water will be the first collection of Lucille Clifton’s poems to be selected and edited by a woman of color. This is the first selected collection of Clifton’s poetry since her death in 2010.

Lucille Clifton’s previous books, including Blessing the Boats and The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, continue to be among BOA’s bestsellers. Her poetry continues to be widely shared and admired on Twitter and Instagram.

The publication of How to Carry Water will coincide with the 51st anniversary of the publication of Lucille Clifton’s first poetry collection Good Times (Random House, 1969) as well as the 20th anniversary of the publication of her National Book Award-winning collection Blessing the Boats (BOA, 2000).

In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition." In 2010, she was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

Editor & Foreword writer Aracelis Girmay is an award-winning, critically acclaimed poet in her own right. Her most recent collection, the black maria (BOA, 2016), won the 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, the 2016 Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry magazine, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and O, the Oprah Magazine.

How to Carry Water will feature a deluxe first edition smyth sewn hardcover with colored endpapers, gold foil stamping, a full-color dust jacket, and a built-in bookmark.

Title will include index of poems in back of collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950774166

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA, 2000), won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA, 1987), and Next: New Poems (BOA, 1987). In 1996, her collection The Terrible Stories (BOA, 1996), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.

Book preview

Reviews for How to Carry Water

[nttrang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Overall, I enjoyed this book of poetry. It stirred some thoughts and I really enjoyed the way the poems were written. Give it a try.