Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s STRUT is a hymn, a praise song, to the ancestors, to those writers and revolutionaries who went before——Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks. These are sensual, life-affirming poems that celebrate the body as our connection to all that shapes us. These imagistic, musical poems will force you to sing along. -Maria Mazziotti Gillan, winner of the American Book Award

Ekere Tallie’s Strut is a reclamation project, a blues mission with a clear antecedent. When Tallie’s poetry “struts,” she awakens us to the borders, the pressures of survival, and the use of song to combat what oppressive forces conspire to trip us in mid-step and negate our beauty. This is the voice between the cracks, the urban belly song that makes room for our heartbreak and happiness.  Tallie is the queen of the haiku blues.  You better put your ear to the street, so you can hear this strut. -Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon

Reading Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie’s poems is like sitting at the feet of a conjure woman plying the secrets of her craft.  This book is a middle passage, a way of saying If you wanna know, you gotta go through it.  Through handclap and holler, these are ‘omanish’ poems, poems that look into the dark, see all the way to the other side.  They sport red at funerals, poke fun at the idea that the dead leave us.  In the ‘by and by’ of these poems, we come to memorize the algebraic formula of Strut, finally understand why. -Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania