Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1973 and was nominated for the National Book Award. The collection’s title captures Walker’s central paradox: that petunias — small, beautiful, domestic flowers — can be revolutionary, and that revolution — political, spiritual, personal — often takes forms that the world dismisses as trivial or feminine.
The poems draw on Walker’s childhood in Eatonton, Georgia, her experiences in the civil rights movement, and her developing feminism (or “womanism,” a term she would coin a decade later). The rural South is not romanticized but is treated with a tenderness that amounts to a political statement: in a literary culture that identified Black experience primarily with urban life, Walker insisted on the beauty and significance of rural Black communities, their gardens, their churches, their oral traditions, their ways of making art from nothing.
The collection is dedicated to “those who plant flowers as well as fists” — a formulation that captures Walker’s refusal to separate aesthetic and political life. The best poems achieve a compression and directness that Walker’s prose sometimes lacks: they are spare, imagistic, grounded in the physical world (flowers, dirt, rain, cotton fields), and they trust the reader to find the political in the personal without being instructed.
Collecting Revolutionary Petunias
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75