Poetry

Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nationhood.In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject--a person, yes, but also...

Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington's Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of...

A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers' Award.Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric...

After exploring the arts and spoken word worlds of her native Chicago and the US East Coast, award-winning journalist, poet, and dreamer Clara Rose Thornton visited Germany for what was supposed to be three idyllic months of writing and rest. What...

A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance--informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body. If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba...

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...

"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...