Lucille Clifton's use of language has incredible rhythm; her lines are measured, purposeful, and incisive; thematically complex but generally only employing a handful of images at any one time. She very successfully uses repetition to create an almost liturgical gravity, especially when invoking specific names. She is also very good at letting language fail when words can take us no farther, as in the last day.

Structurally, my favorite works in this collection were those in which Clifton literally "quilts" newspaper clippings, quotes, or specific events or people into her own voice. 

In terms of content, some of these poems feel more "current" than others. Some of the explicitly feminist poems feel dated because the ways in which feminist discourse today tends to relate to female physiology are less straightforward than they were in the late 1980s (it's probably worth interrogating to what extent this is because the straightforward reclamation Clifton is doing here is less urgently needed today, and to what extent this is simply due to a more complex understanding of gender and of social movements' relations to one another. But I digress).

I also wasn't entirely feeling the grouping of poems inspired by the different heavenly beings' perspectives on the fall of Lucifer, which was an interesting concept but felt less sharply focused in execution. In contrast, I found other biblically-inspired poems in this collection highly effective, as well as those dealing with animals, news/public affairs, and race (that the poems regarding race seem not to have aged in the same way that the poems regarding gender have is, of course, an indictment of the lack of cultural progress which seems to have been made in some respects since publication).