Poetry

A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. With selections from five acclaimed volumes--including his Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning...

The intellectual and cultural revival of African-American arts and politics in the 1920s and 1930s was centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.Here are poems from three major contributors to that rebirth: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, The...

A meditation on our times, cast through a reconsideration of the Justice Department's investigation of the Ferguson Police Department In August 2014, Michael Brown--a young, unarmed black man--was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri...

Slaves in chains, toiling on master's plantation. Beatings, bloodied whips. This is what many of us envision when we think of 19th century African Americans; source materials penned by those who suffered in bondage validate this picture. Yet slavery was...

"A powerful celebration of poets...Lit lovers will be dazzled." --Publishers Weekly Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps...

This wittily written book takes you on a lyrical journey through the various stages of a woman and the self-discovery of love, sex, heartbreak, pain, the empowering effects of being a woman, and her worth coupled with the anxieties of life that give...

"It is time to sing." Grown is a gospel, with Claudia Wilson "singing soprano in perfect pitch." Wilson draws the reader into both the poignant melody and discord of blackness in America, through vivid vignettes and hymn-like prose. This collection is...

Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is...

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's...

In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of "rolling deep" to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary...

"Circles All The Way Down" is a collection of poetry by Barnabas Smith that explores themes of identity, relationships, and the human condition. The poems are written with the character limit of a tweet, 280 characters, and use vivid imagery and...

John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a...

The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey's much anticipated You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female...