On Sonia Sanchez

On the train to work the other day, I reread Sonia Sanchez’s book-length poem Does Your House Have Lions? (1997) and was reminded of what a masterly talent she is. Lions is an epic, torturous and ravishing, about Sanchez’s brother, who decades ago died from AIDS. Sanchez writes of his youth: the estrangement of his father, his move from the South to New York City, the revelry he sought there. Throughout the poem, a choir of voices speaks, bringing a full picture into view. We hear from the father (“and my son’s body blood-stained red / with country-lies, city-lies, father-lies, mother-lies”), from the ailing brother (“O forgive me tremor / O forgive me rumor / O forgive me terror”), even from their family’s ancestors. Still, the lines I find most harrowing, brimming with the most love and the most sorrow, are Sanchez’s own:

and the days rummaging his eyes
and the nights flickering through a slit
of narrow bars. hips. thighs.
and his thoughts labeling him misfit
as he prowled, pranced in the starlit
city, coloring his days and nights
with gluttony and praise and unreconciled rites.

—Caitlin Youngquist