A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charred body gives off light--a halo burns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection.

Norton & Company 1997)
Captivity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1990)
Natural Birth (Ann Arbor: Firebrand Books 1983)
The Empress of the Death House poetry (New York:Lotus Press 1978)


Works about Derricotte
The Image and Identity of the Black Woman in the Poetry and Prose of Toi Derricotte by Dufer Miriam D. "
Her first attempt at sharing her poems with others came when at fifteen Toi Derricotte visited a cousin a medical school student who was then taking an embryology class. [or] talked to [her] about sex" anxiously showed them to this cousin who pronounced them "sick morbid.

Toi Derricotte (pronounced DARE-ah-cot ) (b. A.