Poetry

Gomer's Song is a re-rendering of the Bible story. In Gomer, a harlot who was the wife of the Old Testament prophet Hosea, Kwame Dawes finds the subject for a beautiful contemporary exploration on freedom and sacrifice. Kwame Dawes is an award-winning...

Hailed by Arnold Rampersad as "[Hughes'] most brilliant book of poems," Fine Clothes to the Jew is the stunning sophomore collection of poetry that--in conjunction with The Weary Blues--solidified Langston Hughes as a literary powerhouse.Originally...

When your stories flow from the brackish waters of the Gulf South, where the land and water merge, your narratives cannot be contained or constrained by the Eurocentric conventions of autobiography. When your story is rooted in the histories of your West...

"Breezes blowin' middlin' brisk, / Snowflakes thro' the air a-whisk, / Fallin' kind o' soft an' light, /Not enough to make things white, / But jest sorter siftin' down / So 's to cover up the brown /Of the dark world's rugged ways / 'N' make things look...

Part exploration of a key group of BlackCanadian poets, part literary, cultural, and musical history, Soundin' Canaandemonstrates how music in Black Canadian poetry is not solely aesthetic, but aform of social, ethical, and political expression. ...

Purchase is for those who are grieving, who feel frightened by the world's meanness, who are solitary. It is for those who, even in the midst of mourning, find themselves distracted from despair by the natural world. It is for everyone looking to find...

"The old time Negro preacher of parts was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor. He knew the secret of oratory, that at the bottom of it is a progression of rhythmic words more than anything else. ...He often possessed a voice that was a...

Hailed by Arnold Rampersad as "[Hughes'] most brilliant book of poems," Fine Clothes to the Jew is the stunning sophomore collection of poetry that--in conjunction with The Weary Blues--solidified Langston Hughes as a literary powerhouse.Originally...

Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. SpellmanA. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and...

A surreal poetry collection considering memory and self-discovery through the character of the archon, the keeper of the mental archive. In Ruth Ellen Kocher's Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site...

In her thought-provoking debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, Ashley Elizabeth invites the reader into the depths of her childhood, marked by tragedies including childhood sexual assault, ailing parents, and the loss of innocence. With raw...

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through...

These sonnets were inspired by the Preludes of Chopin. Do keys matter? Do they speak to different parts of us? Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these experimental sonnets seek to question timbre and tone. That's...

A new retrospective of a titan of LGBTQ literature, activism, and Black feminism Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke's illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a...

With fierce candor and an unflinching eye, the highly praised author of Push journeys through the harsh realities of African American existence to find the "door to the possibility of now." The heroes that emerge from these forty-seven vigorous poems...

Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home Jorrell Watkins's debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States's fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in PlayHouse...