Beloved Poet Nikki Giovanni on Love, Friendship, and Loneliness

"Some people forget that love is tucking you in and kissing you 'Good night' no matter how young or old you are." Her poetry is, perhaps above all, a masterwork of translation — the personal into the universal, the mundane into the monumental, the traumatic into the transcendent. Inside and between her verses, the most elemental human longings and concerns — love, loss, friendship, loneliness, freedom — at once new and even more immutable.

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