Poetry

One of America's most celebrated poets challenges us with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart.For more than thirty years, Nikki Giovanni's poetry...

Ohio Railroads is a long poem--in essay form--with origins in the author's memory of a dream in which one of his parents died and the other, in response, sent forward a warning in what may have been the persona of the departed one. Ohio Railroads...

Dave Harris's stellar debut takes a nuanced look at the complexities of black masculinity. Patricide weighs those complexities and how they impact a lineage of black boys who fight to become men in the image of their fathers. More than just a book about...

The stirring debut from the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected and introduced by Chris AbaniHeed the Hollow introduces the work of Malcolm Tariq, whose poems explore the concept of "the bottom" across blackness, sexuality, and the American...

Aaron Samuels, raised in Providence, Rhode Island by a Jewish mother and a Black father, is a Cave Canem Fellow and a nationally acclaimed performer. In this ground-breaking collection of poems, Samuels examines the beauty and contradictions of his own...

How to Survive the Apocalypse, the second collection from poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble, examines the many apocalypses that African Americans have weathered, advising that those who wish to avoid annihilation should "live by rage and joy and turpentine."...

Arguably the greatest African American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown's poems, and the only edition...

2000 marks the centenary of Lift Every Voice and Sing, James Weldon Johnson's most famous lyric, which is now embraced as the Negro National Anthem. In celebration, this Penguin original collects all the poems from Johnson's published works--Fifty Years...

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred social justice movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations about the reality of life--especially Black life--in America. One of the foremost African-American writers and activists of her...

Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to...

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Back in the day when KRS-One intoned--The Bridge is over!--he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives...

A poetry collection in nine sections that each take on an aspect of memory. The poems in t/here it is take multiple forms as each section reflects on variations of experience, engaging with the simultaneity of historic and present time while yearning...