SOURCE: "The Blue/Black Poetics of Sonia Sanchez," in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 119-32.

In the following essay, Jennings describes Sanchez's aesthetics and asserts that her work has "inscribed the humanity of black people."

As a poet, Sonia Sanchez has evolved since her first book Homecoming published in 1969 during the heart of the Black Power Movement. Back then her poetics included a strident tropology that displayed a matriarchal protection of black people. Today, after publishing twelve books of poetry, including the acclaimed Homegirls and Handgrenades and Under a Soprano Sky, one can still discover poetic conventions developed during the Black Arts Movement. The purpose of this artistic movement involved challenging the Eurocentric hegemony in art by developing a new aesthetic that represented the ethos, pathos, and expression of African Americans. These neo-renaissance artists were inspired by...