Sonia Sanchez offers a powerful exploration of personal and shared pain. With passion and precision, Wounded in the House of a Friend confronts issues of rape, race, and gender and grapples with the assault of emotions spawned by betrayals of the mind and spirit - a husband's infidelity, a rape, a granddaughter's drug addiction, the divisions invoked by racism. But this collection is much more than an anatomy of wounds; it is a praise song to the spirit of all people, a testament to the hope that is rebuilt after each private apocalypse. With her mastery of haiku, narrative poetry, and African-American lyricism, Sanchez releases the voices of unspoken pain, transforming the wounds into a healing path of self-fulfillment and liberation, opening the way to a recognition of a new self and renewed self-worth.