Twelve critical essays sketch the tradition of black poets in the U. S. from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's to the black rage of the 1970's. Separate critiques are devoted to the work of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Imamu Amiri Baraka.

From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. "Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." —TIME Magazine A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more. 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. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall

This book consists of eight chapters covering poets from the Harlem Renaissance until the present day. It considers the Harlem Renaissance poets Hughes and Cullen from new perspectives, with regards to two psychological types: self-acceptance and self-dejection. The first two chapters discuss Hughes’ and Cullen’s expression of race relations and the way they protest. Chapter three on Roscoe C. Jamison represents unheard voices, while the fourth chapter, focusing on Ai, analyzes multi-ethnic roots and dissects American society, highlighting the reasons for violence and sexual hunger. Chapter five on Nikky Finney, a representative of Affrilachian poetry and a political activist, focuses on different social and political issues. Chapters six and seven discuss the application of Dual Inheritance Theory on African American and Afro-German poetry. Chapter eight tackles the ongoing effort of redefining black womanhood, with specific emphasis on Morgan Parker.

An outline to the African American poetic conversation of the 1990s, Spirit and Flame is the first intergenerational volume of African American poetry with an expressly contemporary focus since the numerous and influential black poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of numerous forms (jazz stylings to haiku) and topics (middle passage to 0. J.), this present gathering of fifty-three significant poets, among them Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, and Patricia Smith, illustrates both the vibrancy of the African American experience and the talented and current poetic response that is part and parcel of it.

2019 National Book Award Longlist: “Centering on black, female identity, [this is] an exquisite and thoughtful collection.” —Bustle This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains. A finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory. “With Build Yourself a Boat, Camonghne Felix heralds a thrillingly new form of storytelling.” —Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro

I am 27 and have never killed a man but I know the face of death as if heirloom my country memorizes murder as lullaby —from “For Fahd” Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy. Praise for Aja Monet: ““[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.” —Harry Belafonte ““In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.” —Carrie Mae Weems Of Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.