Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez's poetry,this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work,including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969) , through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse,from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation,social equality,and women's rights is evident throughout,as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: "Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly."
Publisher: n/a
|
9780807026526
|
Hardcover
We Inherit What the Fires Left
By Evans, William
William Evans, the award-winning poet and cofounder of the popular culture website Black Nerd Problems, offers an emotionally vulnerable poetry collection exploring the themes of inheritances, dreams, and injuries that are passed down from one generation to the next and delving into the lived experience of a black man in the American suburbs today.In We Inherit What the Fires Left, award-winning poet William Evans embarks on a powerful new collection that explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what dreams and injuries are passed from generation to generation. Fall under the spell of Evans boldly intimate, wise, and emotionally candid voice in these urgent, electrifying poems.This eloquent collection explores not only what these inheritances are composed of, but what price the bearer must pay for such legacies, and the costly tolls exacted on both body and spirit. Evans writes searingly from the perspective of the marginalized, delivering an unflinching examination of what it is like to be a black man raising a daughter in predominantly white spaces, and the struggle to build a home and a future while carrying the weight of the past.However, in beautiful and quiet scenes of domesticity with his daughter or in thoughtful reflection within himself, Evans offers words of hope to listeners, proving that resilience can ultimately bloom even in the face of prejudice. Fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib will find a brilliant, fresh new talent to add to their lists in William Evans.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781982127398
|
Audiobook
Light For The World To See
By Alexander, Kwame
From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwins "A Report from Occupied Territory," Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to Americas crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope. Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780358539414
|
Hardcover
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
By Finney, Nikky
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts - copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of "docu-poetry." The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the "insurgent sensualist," hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ." The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780810142015
|
Hardcover
Indecency
By Reed, Justin Phillip
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in PoetryIndecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful -- the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781566895149
|
Paperback
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
By Hughes, Langston
Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America - the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career.The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror - and the marrow of the bone of life.". The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780679728184
|
Paperback
Wade in the Water
By Smith, Tracy K
The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. -- from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice -- inquisitive, lyrical, and wry -- turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781555978136
|
Hardcover
Citizen
By Rankine, Claudia
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:The New Yorker, Boston Globe,The Atlantic,BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate,Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781555976903
|
Paperback
The Tradition
By Brown, Jericho
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex -- a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues -- is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781556594861
|
Paperback
Homie
By Smith, Danez
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY. Danez Smith is our president. Homie is Danez Smiths magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smiths close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family -- blood and chosen -- arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danezs friends and for you and for yours.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781644450109
|
Paperback
Monument
By Trethewey, Natasha
Urgent new poems on race and gender inequality, and select poems drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocqs Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey.Layering joy and urgent defiance -- against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone -- Tretheweys work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Tretheweys first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, and Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poets own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love. In this setting, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poets remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future. *Academy of American Poets chancellor Marilyn Nelson. "[Tretheweys poems] dig beneath the surface of history -- personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago -- to explore the human struggles that we all face." -- James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress
Publisher: n/a
|
9781328507846
|
Hardcover
Magical Negro
By Parker, Morgan
From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonc comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at O, the Oprah Magazine and Publishers Weekly.Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics -- of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781947793187
|
Paperback
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
By Hayes, Terrance
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryOne of the New York Times Critics Top Books of 2018A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of Americas most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trumps America." -The New York TimesIn seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the countrys past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780143133186
|
Paperback
White Blood
By Petrosino, Kiki
In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I'm a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Publisher: n/a
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9781946448545
|
Paperback
Hybrida
By Chang, Tina
"One of the most important books of poetry to come along in years." - Craig Morgan Teicher, NPRNamed a Best Book of 2019 by NPR and Publishers Weekly, Hybrida is a stirring and confident examination of mixed-race identity, violence, and history skillfully rendered through the lens of motherhood. In an agile blend of zuihitsu, ghazal, mosaic poems, and lyric essays, Tina Chang "evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son" (New York Times) . Ambitious and revelatory, Hybrida establishes Chang as one of the most vital voices of her generation.
Publisher: n/a
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9781324002482
|
Hardcover
A Fortune for Your Disaster
By Abdurraqib, Hanif
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside -- from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs -- to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
Publisher: n/a
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9781947793439
|
Paperback
1919
By Ewing, Eve L.
"The Zora Neale Hurston of her generation." -- Studio 360"A truly rare cultural phenomenon: an artist who not only holds up a mirror to society, but makes herself a catalyst to change it." -- Chicago TribuneThe Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the "Red Summer" of violence across the nation's cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event -- which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries -- through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.
Publisher: n/a
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9781608465989
|
Paperback
Living Weapon
By Phillips, Rowan Ricardo
Award-winning essayist and poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips presents a bracing renewal of civic poetry in Living Weapon.. . . . and wed do this againAnd again and again, without everKnowing we were the weapon ourselves,Stronger than steel, story, and hydrogen. -- from "Even Homer Nods". A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: Rowan Ricardo Phillipss Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light honed in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere; four NYPD officers enter a cellphone store; concrete sidewalks hang overhead. Here, in his third collection of poems, Phillips offers us ruminations on violins and violence, on hatred, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. Living Weapon reveals to us the limitations of our vocabulary, that our platitudes are not enough for the brutal times in which we find ourselves. But still, our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as they are an indictment. Couched in language both wry and ample, Living Weapon is a piercing addition from a "virtuoso poetic voice" (Granta) .
Publisher: n/a
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9780374191993
|
Paperback
Felon
By Betts, Reginald Dwayne
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) .Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems -- canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace -- and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility -- from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.
Publisher: n/a
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9780393652147
|
Hardcover
African American Poetry
By Young, Kevin
Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. Here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer.
Collected Poems
By Sanchez, Sonia
Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez's poetry,this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work,including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969) , through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse,from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation,social equality,and women's rights is evident throughout,as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: "Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly."
We Inherit What the Fires Left
By Evans, William
William Evans, the award-winning poet and cofounder of the popular culture website Black Nerd Problems, offers an emotionally vulnerable poetry collection exploring the themes of inheritances, dreams, and injuries that are passed down from one generation to the next and delving into the lived experience of a black man in the American suburbs today.In We Inherit What the Fires Left, award-winning poet William Evans embarks on a powerful new collection that explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what dreams and injuries are passed from generation to generation. Fall under the spell of Evans boldly intimate, wise, and emotionally candid voice in these urgent, electrifying poems.This eloquent collection explores not only what these inheritances are composed of, but what price the bearer must pay for such legacies, and the costly tolls exacted on both body and spirit. Evans writes searingly from the perspective of the marginalized, delivering an unflinching examination of what it is like to be a black man raising a daughter in predominantly white spaces, and the struggle to build a home and a future while carrying the weight of the past.However, in beautiful and quiet scenes of domesticity with his daughter or in thoughtful reflection within himself, Evans offers words of hope to listeners, proving that resilience can ultimately bloom even in the face of prejudice. Fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib will find a brilliant, fresh new talent to add to their lists in William Evans.
Light For The World To See
By Alexander, Kwame
From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwins "A Report from Occupied Territory," Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to Americas crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope. Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior.
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
By Finney, Nikky
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts - copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of "docu-poetry." The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the "insurgent sensualist," hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ." The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page.
Indecency
By Reed, Justin Phillip
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in PoetryIndecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful -- the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
By Hughes, Langston
Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America - the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career.The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror - and the marrow of the bone of life.". The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.
Wade in the Water
By Smith, Tracy K
The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. -- from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice -- inquisitive, lyrical, and wry -- turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
Citizen
By Rankine, Claudia
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
The Tradition
By Brown, Jericho
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex -- a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues -- is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Homie
By Smith, Danez
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY. Danez Smith is our president. Homie is Danez Smiths magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smiths close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family -- blood and chosen -- arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danezs friends and for you and for yours.
Monument
By Trethewey, Natasha
Urgent new poems on race and gender inequality, and select poems drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocqs Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey.Layering joy and urgent defiance -- against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone -- Tretheweys work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Tretheweys first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, and Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poets own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love. In this setting, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poets remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future. *Academy of American Poets chancellor Marilyn Nelson. "[Tretheweys poems] dig beneath the surface of history -- personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago -- to explore the human struggles that we all face." -- James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress
Magical Negro
By Parker, Morgan
From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonc comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at O, the Oprah Magazine and Publishers Weekly.Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics -- of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
By Hayes, Terrance
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryOne of the New York Times Critics Top Books of 2018A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of Americas most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trumps America." -The New York TimesIn seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the countrys past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
White Blood
By Petrosino, Kiki
In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I'm a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Hybrida
By Chang, Tina
"One of the most important books of poetry to come along in years." - Craig Morgan Teicher, NPRNamed a Best Book of 2019 by NPR and Publishers Weekly, Hybrida is a stirring and confident examination of mixed-race identity, violence, and history skillfully rendered through the lens of motherhood. In an agile blend of zuihitsu, ghazal, mosaic poems, and lyric essays, Tina Chang "evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son" (New York Times) . Ambitious and revelatory, Hybrida establishes Chang as one of the most vital voices of her generation.
A Fortune for Your Disaster
By Abdurraqib, Hanif
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside -- from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs -- to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
1919
By Ewing, Eve L.
"The Zora Neale Hurston of her generation." -- Studio 360"A truly rare cultural phenomenon: an artist who not only holds up a mirror to society, but makes herself a catalyst to change it." -- Chicago TribuneThe Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the "Red Summer" of violence across the nation's cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event -- which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries -- through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.
Living Weapon
By Phillips, Rowan Ricardo
Award-winning essayist and poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips presents a bracing renewal of civic poetry in Living Weapon.. . . . and wed do this againAnd again and again, without everKnowing we were the weapon ourselves,Stronger than steel, story, and hydrogen. -- from "Even Homer Nods". A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: Rowan Ricardo Phillipss Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light honed in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere; four NYPD officers enter a cellphone store; concrete sidewalks hang overhead. Here, in his third collection of poems, Phillips offers us ruminations on violins and violence, on hatred, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. Living Weapon reveals to us the limitations of our vocabulary, that our platitudes are not enough for the brutal times in which we find ourselves. But still, our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as they are an indictment. Couched in language both wry and ample, Living Weapon is a piercing addition from a "virtuoso poetic voice" (Granta) .
Felon
By Betts, Reginald Dwayne
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) .Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems -- canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace -- and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility -- from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.
African American Poetry
By Young, Kevin
Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. Here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer.