Poetry

The award-winning "lively and excellent collection" (Los Angeles Times) about the South and its legacy, about African-American griefs and passages, from the author of Jelly Roll and Black Maria, a poet who has "set himself apart from his peers with his...

Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in...

This selection of more than forty poems from a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance includes both uncompromising indictments of racial injustice and celebrations of the triumphs of African-Americans. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the...

Rest like the sun does: Schedule some timeto stay out of sightwhen too many peoplepraise warm energy ...THE BOOK.Poet Laureate Marcus Amaker's (he/him) tenth book, Hold What Makes You Whole, is a pocket-sized full-color collection of new and selected...

Beauty is a poetry collection about racial identity in America for youth and adults. The author's personal experiences are woven into poetic narratives and verses that share thoughts, feelings, and ideas about each situation. Beauty addresses societal...

A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery.In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the...

A call to anyone who thought they were alone on the journey, Incantations for Rest is for kindred spirits: neurodivergent folks, parents up late past bedtime nursing resentment, Black people in predominantly white spaces--anyone who has found themselves...

Who are Black Creoles? Saloy's new poems address ancestral connections to contemporary life, traditions celebrated, New Orleans Black life today, Louisiana Black life today, enduring and surviving hurricanes, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, #wematter, as...

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those...

The speaker of Testify returns to divulge his parents' love story. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the "lyrical I" in...