RUNAWAY: A Memoir in Verse

Imani Tolliver is a crafter of indelible truths. By turns beautiful and brutal, sparse and opulent, these poems sink into the marrow. Here is a poet at her highest arc and Runaway is a luminescent gift.— Jelani Cobb
I don’t know that I’ve ever read another poet whose work is as profoundly generous as Imani Tolliver’s. Not only by way of her crystalline images, self-possessed disclosures, and clear language measured to the pocket of breath but by how she writes “as if the words were made of spun sugar/instead of scars.” She fills these poems with amber light that evokes honey, sepia, and L.A. dusk filtering through a curtain. That’s why when I encounter a line where Tolliver’s grief—lit for all eyes to see—takes hold of a stanza, I feel wrenched like one falling from what was once sure ground. What Runaway, here at long last, shows us is that the condition of grace itself is to love that which has fallen. This book right here is an account of that love, hard-won and all the bolder for it. This book right here is golden.

— Douglas Kearney

Runaway: A Memoir in Verse, is a supernatural, soul-grabbing poetic autobiography by Imani Tolliver, one of our best writers who deserves her shine more than ever. With her words as a blood-and-bone-propelled time traveler, we journey with Tolliver through the limbs and body parts of bronze statue kinfolk through the mysteries and memories of warrior mothers and warrior daughters through love that tastes mighty good and love that tastes mighty bad through the hard-earned self-love born to this child of the dust sun-kissed in California, with dreadlocked roots in the American South to the tender and quietly powerful love shared between girls, between women through the ugliness of and resistance to racism, to sexism, to anything that would cage a bird who has greased her own wings with the melancholy blues of integration and that spit-fire national anthem they called the Los Angeles riot. This book is the testimony of a woman, a being, who has stripped bare her own skin, multiple times, and has found in her fearless telling the peace, the love, that should be our birthright forever.

— Kevin Powell

The poems in Imani Tolliver’s elegant new memoir in verse pull us toward and away from the kind of rough truths that only a writer of Tolliver’s skill can manage. Her vital narratives follow the poet’s evolution in a world full of violation and trauma that stretches from the analog of the 1970s to her hard-earned redemption and fulfillment through poetry years later. And through her triumphs, we triumph. Through her resilience, we become more resilient. This is a beautiful, hurtful book.

— Adrian Matejka

Our lives and lessons have the potential to make us better if we learn to face the darkness and transform it into light. This is done by sitting before life's mirror and not looking away. This is what Imani does within her poems, chase away shadows so we can see the beauty, experience healing, and growth. Her strength is in not running away from the things she sees. Her poems are full of light.

— Kamau Daaood

Geography and intimacy are the concentric great migrations of Tolliver's Runaway. While she is in the company of so many Afrodiasporic writers who move from bayou to Black Atlantic, to Leimert Park, I'm not sure there is any Los Angeles poet who moves from Degnan Blvd to Palms Blvd to Sunset and Gower with the specificity and soul force of Imani Tolliver. And the migrations of the heart here—once bruised, betrayed now blooming—lift this from a collection of poems to a gathering of practical praise songs, a grown woman's healing manifesto.

— Josslyn Luckett

Whether on the stage or the page, Imani Tolliver brings both an exhilarating energy and a timely wisdom that we need now more than ever. If you feel a “rush of pounding” in the heart as you read on, it’s only the music of her line and her brilliant turns through the journey of life’s challenges. It’s a celebration not only of her journey but also of a life in which books served as stepping-stones on the path. I wish I had these poems when I started my journey, and you will, too. She renders scenes from the past with the higher knowledge of a speaker who has learned a thing or two from the experience. Isn’t this the reason we read poetry? Yes, and this is the book we were looking for. Let’s join her and runaway to “a shore of books…the place of the open story."

— A. Van Jordan

Runaway is a tour de force. Imani Tolliver’s journey into herself is a sacred odyssey that the reader feels pulled into from the very beginning. Tolliver’s poems take us through her struggles with identity and voice, her experiences with sexual violence, her love for women, her discovery of erotic power, her realization of self. Her poems are the “layin on of hands,” that Ntosake Shange wrote about four decades ago. As such, Tolliver is the poetic daughter of Shange and other writers—Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni—the daughter and the gift these Black women wrote into the world and bequeathed to their descendants. Tolliver’s own legacy is this gorgeous, painful, exquisite, and immensely humbling collection of poems that cannot but leave one transformed.

— Aisha Finch

In Runaway, Imani Tolliver unfolds like the clasped fingers of a child done looking for a savior outside of herself. These intimate poems are steeped in a dangerous cocktail of revelation and emotional risk-taking. I wanted to whisper, “Be careful.” This is the power of craft at work. Tolliver is a wordsmith who commands language to cast spells on literary voyeurs. A memoir in verse that whispers to you long after you finish the last poem.

— Michael Datcher