Naked to the Earth is a wide-ranging, lyrical, jarring, playful, elegiac, dissonant, amazing quest to understand who we are and how we became who we are. This book will make you think - deeply and profoundly - about relationships, culture, obligation (to ourselves and others, those we love and those we may not love but should), violence and war. It is as reflective and thought-provoking, as lyrically beautiful as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and as searing an indictment of our past and present as Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States. This book is the distillation of a lifetime by a poet who has personally experienced injustice and the misuse of power, but has not given anyone the power to make her hate. It is the work of a master poet in complete control of her craft, looking back, looking forward, reflecting on life and the human condition, distilling it to its essence so that she - and we - can see with clarity the beauty, the commonality and the interconnectedness in all of us as we travel through our history, to make sense of it, the world we have created, the world we inhabit, and our place in it.
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