Does Your House Have Lions?
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Sonia Sanchez |
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| Publisher | Beacon Press |
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| Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez’s brother—a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city’s gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother’s alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain.… | |
Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez’s brother—a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city’s gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother’s alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain. This brave epic poem shatters silences surrounding gay sexuality in African-American families and imagines the possibility of reconciliation and love. It offers a meditation on the living meanings of journey, life, and death—an opportunity for all of us to find a way home.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
The poetic blend of compassion and outrage that have marked Sonia Sanchez’s political writing since the 1960s shines through this very personal account of a family’s tragedy. The poems trace the story of Sanchez’s brother: his alienation from his family, his struggle with HIV, and the family’s eventual healing. Sanchez spins these lines in the voices of all the family members, as well as ancestors. The narrative takes on the elevated tone of Greek tragedy, or maybe the more solemn works of Wole Soyinka, and gives some sense of how overwhelming, painful, and powerful family bonds can be. June Jordan writes that this book joins Sanchez’s “best poetry to her deepest feelings.”
