Exquisite Heats

The import of sound and music, cultural iconography, and the fine-spun image are pulsing throughout Cherryl Floyd-Miller’s third collection of poems, Exquisite Heats. She explores the infinite manifestations of heat in the human experience. She moves comfortably from issues of public history and personal identity to the musings of revered icons. R&B legend Rick James speaks of impropriety and addiction, Marvin Gaye reveals his aesthetic struggles as a popular artist, Billie Holiday gives voice lessons, Alice Walker’s Celie Johnson boils grits, and Joe Frazier recounts the night he beat Muhammad Ali.

Employing persona poems, ars poetica, the blues, sestinas, ghazals, sonnets and narrative free verse, Floyd-Miller proves her poetic skill through a wide range of form. In the award-winning poem, “Voodoo Chicken,” she lures you to take a sultry plunge into daring language and bewitching subject matter. But as she warns in the opening of this collection: Careful. “Nothing is there to catch you.”