John Warner Smith speaks on A Mandala of Hands.

“Each of the experiences shared here has moved me to feel, think or act in some way that bends toward light or virtue, at least as I would define it. Each has in some way shaped the limits and possibilities of my own personal journey—even when I have been unconscious of their influence. It is in the vicissitudes and seasons, in the awareness and blindness of human self, with its strangely conflicting and compensating opposites of power and vulnerability, where I find the inspiration, the need finally, to portray human experience, the black experience, through poetry.”