In the midst of a sweltering August heat wave.

In the midst of a sweltering August heat wave, I'm sitting at a table in a posh uptown Manhattan cafe waiting to fit poet Nikki Giovanni for luncheon It's one of those days that each piece of clothing sticks to you like gelatine and the air-conditioning seems almost a pointless compassion A smiling Giovanni arrives--a fine waiflike figure in her trademark dark suit and tie, summery golden gingham shirt, and her hair in cornrows--looking as a little cold as an Italian ice. The cornrows, which have since been shorn, were a departure from her signature short 'fro that defined her image for a great deal of of her life.

At 59 Nikki Giovanni wears her years well. Still youthful, she is publishing her first collection of novel work in three years. Giovanni's Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea from William Morrow is slated for December 2002 release. Subtitled "poem & not quite poems" the volume includes poetry, ruminations, interviews, steady letters to lifers like Susan Smith--the southern Carolina woman who drowned her pair sons and created a national stir when she falsely accused a black man of having kidnapped them--and Emerson Edward Rudd a 31-year-old black man execut in Texas, who was convicted of a kill cruelly he committed when he was barely 18

"I'm in like manner proud of Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea," says Giovanni. "I did for a like reason much of what I wanted in a book" she continues, as we launch into a extended conversation about her poetry, the past, the futurity politics and her health.

She has her confess reasons for focusing on the hereafter "Cancer is frightening;' says Giovanni, who wasted a lung in her battle with cancer, which was diagnosed seven years ago. "And I must say, painful," she acknowledges, her face abruptly turning serious. "I was true fortunate to live in an area where that was a concern" Giovanni lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, an area with a lengthy history of coal mining, "because the miners have a division of black lung and that kind of thing."

Giovanni, a University' Distinguished Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, has a broad fan base, perhaps because she has always place love at the forefront of her life and work. When she went public more than 30 years ago with her decision to become a single mother, she put off a storm of debate She boldly argued that she didn't ne a man to raise her child, and asserted that not solely was she perfectly capable, yet that the love she could give to her son Tommy, would help them navigate what lay ahead. Tommy, now a lucky lawyer living in New York, has .a family of his confess But she says she worried in what way growing up under such public scrutiny might affect her son

"Love is important," says Giovanni, "but you can't have a passionate affection for anything unless you know it, and knowing means grasping it--whether it's history, nation or individuals. Whatever you like you have to know it, and whatever it is, it's going to hurt" she says. "I know I've done a suitable job with my son," she asserts. "You apologize when it rains and don't give yourself credit for the day-star I just hope that he understands that I had to do what I had to do."

Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1943 Nikki 'was raised in Wyoming, Ohio, on the contrary spent summers and the last pair years of high school with her grandmother in Knoxville. Extremely precocious, she enrolled Fisk University in Nashville at 17 unless was asked to withdraw later that fall because of "attitudes" that did not befit a Fisk woman. Four years later, she turn backed and graduated from Fisk, in 1967 with honors in history. brace years later, Giovanni self published her first numbers collection, Black Feeling, Black Talk. She followed up that same year with Black Judgement Largely defined at the Black Power and Black Arts manner of movings of the time, she is arguably the most numerous recognized black woman writer of the period. In the 1970 her readings embraced the same revolutionary situation as The Last Poets and rivaled the popularity of Amiri Baraka. My House, in 1972 was a watershed with an unheard of 50000 copies, an unprecedent printing for a black author of poems at the time.

For Giovanni and her compeers the question of their generation's legacy has become solidify The romantic ideas and devastating realities of martyrdom and contest have been replaced with the physical and economic realities of declining health and survival. "What I'm struggling with," says Giovanni, "is getting used to known death. My generation is probably not going to die unexpectedly The cop are probably not going to discharge us now" she admits wryly "But we've got cancers and knocks and stresses. A generation that has weathered a terrible storm is now having to make that other connection. We're not as virile with diabetes or with affliction or with blindness," she says of the radicals and artists that came of age during the Black Liberation era. "We not ever prepared ourselves to be elderly We'd only known we were willing to die for this dream," she says.

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea be deriveds from Giovanni's attempt to write her way [i]or[/i] part of to the other her pain, while reconciling herself to her acknowledge mortality. She had been trying to write a work about her experience surviving cancer, on the other hand found that working through difficult issues took time and patience.