Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

Alice Walker is known throughout the world as not only a great writer but an activist and a woman who shares the inner turmoil and outer struggles of her life. Readers admire her ability to bare her heart and soul, but to also speak out about the world as she sees it, often becoming a catalyst for change.

This book came about when Walker started a website and blog and wanted to provide poetry suitable for challenging times. As the title suggests, these poems were written during struggles and sadness and deal with the loss of siblings, the loss of a beloved dog, the estrangement in families, violence and struggles on the world stage, and the simple joy of life itself. The words dance, they sing, they heal our hearts and touch our souls.

As Shiloh McCloud writes in the foreword: "Alice Walker’s latest collection of poems was conceived over the course of one year. Her journey includes the death of loved ones and the birth of new ideas, the sorrow of rejection and the deliciousness of love, the sweetness of home, familial abandonment and what it means to belong to the greater world family. We are witness to the characteristic self-confidence that so profoundly distinguishes Alice’s work -- her ability to take that which is heart wrenchingly sad, share the guts of that sadness, and then, through a tapestry of richly colored words, weave a resolution that leaves the poem with a way to "be” about that sorrow, not drowned under it. She does not leave the poem or the reader in distress, but soothes the aching heart of the matter with true poetry.”