"The Weary Blues is Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems, immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release. Over ninety years after its publication, it remains a critically acclaimed literary work and still invokes a fresh, contemporary feeling and offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From the title poem "The Weary Blues," echoing the sounds of the blues, to "Dream Variations," ringing with joyfulness, to...

"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar. -- [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music -- This book is a glorious revelation." -- Boston Globe Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest...

God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse is a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson patterned after traditional African-American spiritual oratory. African-American scholars have identified the collection as one of Johnson's two most notable works, the other being Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The work went on to find acclaim in many circles, proving "enormously popular among both the black cognoscenti as well of the masses of black Americans"...

"A selection of new and previously published poems from the celebrated poet"--

Intimate, edgy, and unapologetic, Blues: For All the Changes bears the mark of Nikki Giovanni's unmistakable voice. In a career that has spanned three decades, Giovanni has created an indispensable body of work and earned a place among the nation's most celebrated and controversial poets; Gloria Naylor calls her "one of our national treasures." Now, in these fifty-two new poems, Giovanni brings the passion, fearless wit, and intensely personal self...

Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black, Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"--A song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"--to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's...

Overview: Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 is the culminating achievement of Lucille's Clifton longstanding poetry career. This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting and The Terrible Stories....

"Originally performed at the Kennedy Center for the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and later as a tribute to Walter Dean Myers, this stirring and inspirational poem is New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds's rallying cry to the dreamers of the world. For Every One is just that: for every one. For every one person. For every one dream. But especially for every one kid. The kids who dream...

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 collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and...

""This book talks smack. This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. Francine J. Harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."-Evie Shockley -- Lyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated...