Lions Don't Eat Us

Selected by Sonia Sanchez, Lions Don't Eat Us is the 2005 winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, given to the best first collection by an African American poet. Judge Sonia Sanchez says, “These poems radiate a tough-minded her story/history that demands that we investigate, listen to, dance within, and defend their beauty.”

In one of Aesop’s Fables, the Roman slave Androcles befriends the emperor’s lion prior to his trial and thereby survives certain death in the arena. Constance Quarterman Bridges’s father tells this story to his children and says, “My Babies, we’re special people, lions don’t eat us.”

“In Lions Don’t Eat Us, Constance Quarterman Bridges gives readers the gift of the griot’s embodied eloquence, memory working to delicately braid the fibers of a family’s connected lives. The core of the African-American tradition has been waiting for this book.”—Afaa Michael Weaver

“When I finished reading Lions Don’t Eat Us, the first word that came to mind was dignity, Constance Quarterman Bridges’s own, and the dignity she confers on her cast of characters. She doesn’t try to startle us with the outrages of slavery and their aftermath; she assumes we know them. Instead she honors her ancestors by mediating their histories, and by giving them voice. Bridges has stories to tell, witnessing to do, and in this her first book she finds a language equal to her task that pretties up nothing while remaining lyrical and lovingly precise.”—Stephen Dunn