[Hacker is an American poet and critic. In the following, she offers praise for Some One Sweet Angel Chile.]

Some One Sweet Angel Chile, by Sherley Anne Williams speaks in tongues and sings in many voices. It begins with an elegant and revelatory series of epistolary poems, "Letters From a New England Negro," written in the persona of an educated young black woman gone south, in 1867, to teach her newly-freed people. She learns as much as she teaches; the contradictions and rewards of the life she has left, as well as the situation she has come to are unfolded with a clarity and complexity that were as satisfying to this reader as a 500-page novel. In a completely different vocabulary and rhythm, the middle sequence of poems celebrates Bessie Smith, and illuminates another facet of the history and heroism of black women. Here, in cadences echoing the blues, the author animates a chorus of men and women around the legendary Bessie to give a rounded and reverberating oratorio. The book's last section, in contemporary voices, often has for landscape the poet's native Southern California. The primacy of music continues as a theme, along with the complexity of relationships between black women and men. With a different perspective, the poet reexamines family, history, and the interstices between.