In 2024, does your house have lions by Sonia Sanchez was one of my favorite reads. Shake Loose Your Skin is my first deep dive into Sanchez’s work and it provided a curious snapshot into her legend. does your house have lions? is likely the apex of her career, as she has only published one book after this new and selected, and the poems from dyhhl were by far was the best part of the new and selected. In content, many of the poems and essays in this collection grapple with gendered violence and surviving toxic masculinity in intimate relationships. Sanchez details the pain of adultery and addiction repeatedly in a confessional and heartbreaking voice with little literary stunting. Reading Shake Loose Your Skin made me feel the same way I did after catching up with a homegirl after far too long and too much has happened. I was pleasantly surprised to find a long poem dedicated to Tupac Shakur. Giovanni had a poem for Tupac too and it makes me happy knowing all the dope Black women were writing poems for him. The poems carry a natural musicality, relying on the rhythms of AAV, rather than stringent form or other phonetic flexes. While many poems are obviously meant to be sung or spoken aloud, they are still rendered on the page with a subtly that rewards close readings for deceptively smooth line breaks and evolution of arguments. 3 out of 5.