Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry & Poetics of Lucille Clifton

Winner of the 2025 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, this long-awaited and much-needed volume shines new light on one of America’s most beloved, and profound, poets—Lucille Clifton.

Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton’s work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim Ali. Collecting chapters of Clifton’s early manuscripts, late drafts, and integrating her books of children’s literature, Ali’s meticulously researched volume provides a brilliant and fresh perspective on Clifton’s life and work.

Various chapters examine Clifton’s treatment of the body as a site of both joy and danger, spirituality, and an interrogation of American history, politics, and popular culture. The result of Ali’s scholarship and care highlights a dazzling array of Clifton’s poetic techniques and forms that will continue to inspire poets, readers, and Lucille Clifton fans—past, present and future—for decades to come.

Praise for Black Buffalo Woman

“There are few joys as authentic as witnessing one poet praise and honor another. Lucille Clifton is one such poet that deserves all the praise from those of us who attempt to wander in her wake. In Black Buffalo Woman, Kazim Ali allows for not only the elucidation of Clifton's poems, but for their illumination. Each thoughtful essay lifts her poems to the light and returns you to Clifton's brilliance and power.” —Ada Limón, 2022 Poet Laureate of the United States, author of The Carrying

“In Kazim Ali’s Black Buffalo Woman, Lucille Clifton’s poetic craft is given the microscope it deserves. Her scope and reach are often forgotten; here, illuminated and celebrated, her heartwork and mastery go hand-in-hand, as she has created her own syntax, metered music, decadent elegies and infinite memory. Ali understands that Black language is myriad, so Clifton creates unparalleled nuance, moving language inside out of itself, reinscribing history. Her poems are fearless, funny, sexy, lush, biting, spiritual while political, reverent and indignant, rune and rumination—she contains multitudes. In her hands, the body is an opening, a pathway to divinity, no matter how broken, how willful or wild and dark. In Black Buffalo Woman, Lucille Clifton’s spirit goes on, words transcend, and her craft is a collage of blooming, ‘a perpetual asking,’ insisting we re-examine each realm of our ever-difficult, ever-miraculous living." —Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up