To go back is a verb conjugated in dreams, Lauren K. Alleyne writes in her debut volume Difficult Fruit, inscribing the governing mystery of this work, the secret knowledge of the dead. In anaphoric bursts of incantatory disclosure, in ghazals of love and survival, eros and the infinite, she does, indeed, go back, past all griefs and illuminations, to the song beneath the song. There is uncommon spiritual knowledge here as well as political discernment. There is much to learn while accompanying Alleyne on her raft of language, through a troubled world and an imagined heaven, to the place from which comes all singing. I have gone with her and would do so again and again. - Carolyn Forche These lyrics lay bare the marrow, examine an interior life and dreams, then turn their faces outward to the world with messages of celebration, cultural displacement, the transport of temporal sensation and the torment and regret of violence and self-destruction. - Alison Meyers, Executive Director of Cave Canem Lauren Alleyne's voice is a revelatory and formidable fusion of irrepressible music and uncompromising craft. Like snippets of cinema, these poems arrest the senses and challenge what's known. Every door this exceptional work opens onto a larger light. - Patricia Smith Difficult Fruit is a book I wish there were no need for. But need there is; and Alleyne delivers poems of loss and grief and, thankfully, hope. Meaning is the closest we get to salvation,/which is to say the word changes nothing/--it does not unmake the rivers, she writes. But addressing the ages in ghazal and crown and free verse forms, she reminds us, in the flaming sentence that in one's life, it is in the raft of language we begin our escape. - Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon In a masterful and sure poetic voice, a stunning debut, Lauren Alleyne takes us through the milestones of a life - from the vulnerabilities of a woman facing the pressures of forming her own identity, to what it means to be a person of difference, to what it means to journey through a culture with racial profiling. At the same time, Alleyne shows us what it means to love, to become engaged in a life of passion directed not only toward a single person but toward the world at large. - Mary Swander, Poet Laureate of Iowa, author of The Girls on the Roof Readers will enjoy this body of work because of its unconventional approach and Alleyne's personal touch is just enough for readers to understand that she's writing from the heart. Take the plunge and enjoy a piece of Difficult Fruit. - Leslie Haidez De Jesus, qbr.com This collection of poems, small in size, carries great power and beauty and insightfulness within its covers ... The words carry much weight within their arrangements and much beauty in their cadence. Lauren K. Alleyne has stripped away the pretenses so often found in such collections and given readers the assignment to examine their own lives and find the essences of their souls. Rosi Hollinbeck, San Francisco Book Review
