[Ntozake] Shange's wit, her fierce anger, her sensuality and, most of all, her masterful, surprising use of language were of such potency that they bestrode, not only the Atlantic, but the gulf between her race and mine.

nappy edges, Shange's latest book of poetry resumes a great many of the themes of for colored girls …: love, lust, music, friendship, the condition of being a woman, of being black. It even contains three or four of the earlier poems, in a slightly altered form…. The three introductory pieces and several of the poems themselves are bloated almost beyond readability by Shange's current self-consciousness of herself as a celebrity and as an ambassador of black, feminist writing.

I do say "almost," however, because nothing that she writes is ever entirely unreadable, springing, as it does, from such as intense honesty, from so fresh an awareness of the beauty of sound...