Clifton's poetry (spare, vernacular, unflinching) meditates on the Black female body, her ancestors, her family's history of abuse, and the spiritual dimensions of survival. "won't you celebrate with me / what I have shaped into / a kind of life?" is the most defiant and tender declaration in contemporary American poetry. Two National Book Awards. Ruth Lilly Prize. Her brevity was not simplicity but compression; her shortest poems hold enormous weight.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.