By My Precise Haircut

About Cheryl Clarke

Cheryl Clarke is a black lesbian feminist poet and the author of four previous books of poetry—Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, Living as a Lesbian, Humid Pitch, and Experimental Love—as well as the chapbook, Your Own Lovely Bosom, the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, and a collected work, The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005. With Steven G. Fullwood she edited To Be Left with the Body, a literary publication of the AIDS Project, Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Conditions, Sinister Wisdom, Callaloo, and African American Literary Review, and in the anthologies This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; and The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave.

Praise for By My Precise Haircut

In By My Precise Haircut Cheryl Clarke collects histories that are all, in effect, personal. Whether the tone is wily or grieving, wise or wise-ass, the reader is drawn closer by the page and into a world that may be Black, Lesbian, middle-aged, sister of a deceased Sgt. J. L. Winters, daughter of the Block Elder—but is certainly a threshold for all.
—Kimiko Hahn, Judge Author of Toxic Flora and Brain Fever

When I first met the firebrand poet Cheryl Clarke, I was 25 and it was 1983 and the Kitchen Table book was Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women. I would keep that book close and never forget her name and it would be years before we set eyes on each other in the world. Nevertheless, the black woman lesbian die was cast. The words that Cheryl Clarke slept with then are the words she sleeps with now: catastrophe, voluptuousness, gang-rape, at the hands of the state, longing, stolen, never enough. Cheryl has stayed the firebrand course all while inventing new and wondrous paths.
—Nikky Finney, author of The World Is Round and Head Off and Split