Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes - REVIEW

by Langston Hughes, Edited by Danez Smith

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works written from 1921-1927 curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith. Hanif Abdurraqib calls the collection of polished poems and raw, unfinished, works-in-progress, “a gift to any poet working at any stage of their life and career.”

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. 

From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he travels the world, celebrate love as a tool of liberation, and enjoy his musical verse poetry, including a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score. Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions contained in Hughes’s early work.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1901. Often called 'The People’s Poet,' he authored and edited over thirty works poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children’s books. He was a poetic innovator and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and his writing promoted equality, condemned racism and injustice, and helped shape American literature and politics. He died on May 22, 1967, in New York City. 

Danez Smith (Curator) is the author of four poetry collections including Bluff, Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez lives in Minneapolis with their people.

Legacy Lit
ISBN-13 ‏ 978-1538768914

Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney - REVIEW

by Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell

The poet William Waring Cuney (1906–1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846–1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874–1936), the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney’s maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.

Cuney was born and raised in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city’s Black elite, Cuney embraced his family’s passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.

Through 100 of his best poems, many never before collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.

Texas Tech University Press
ISBN-13 978-1682831977

Sing a Black Girl's Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange - REVIEW

by Ntozake Shange. Edited by Imani Perry

Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, curated by National Book Award winner Imani Perry with a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Tarana Burke.

In the late ’60s, Ntozake Shange was a student at Barnard College discovering her budding talent as a writer, publishing in her school’s literary journal, and finding her unique voice. By the time she left us in 2018,  Shange had scorched blazing trails across countless pages and stages, redefining genre and form as we know them, each verse, dance, and song a love letter to Black women and girls, and the community at large.

Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a new posthumous collection of Shange’s unpublished poems, essays, and plays from throughout the life of the seminal Black feminist writer. In these pages we meet young Shange, learn the moments that inspired for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf…, travel with an eclectic family of musicians, sit on “The Couch” opposite Shange’s therapist, and discover plays written after for colored girls’ international success. Sing a Black Girl’s Song houses, in their original form, the literary rebel’s politically charged verses from the Black Arts Movement era alongside her signature tender rhythm and cadence  that capture the minutia and nuance of Black life. Sing a Black Girl’s Song is the continuation of a literary tradition that has bolstered generations of writers and a long-lasting gift from one of the fiercest and most highly celebrated artists of our time.

Ntozake Shange, author of thirty-six published works, is increasingly recognized as one of America’s greatest writers having, for fifty years, embodied the struggle of women of color for equality and the recognition of their contribution to human culture. Shange’s literary legacy, preserved in the Shange Institute at Barnard College, comprises thirteen plays, seven novels, six children’s books and nineteen poetry collections, the majority of which are published and in print. Her 1974 “choreo-poem,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow Is enuf, retains its status as the longest-running play by an African American writer in Broadway history. The 2022 Broadway revival of for colored girls garnered seven TONY Award nominations. She has been posthumously inducted into both the NY State Writers and the Off-Broadway Alliance Halls of Fame, cementing her legacy as one of the most cherished Black feminist writers of our time.

Imani Perry (Editor) is the Carol K. Pforzheimer professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor of African American studies and women and gender studies at Harvard University. She is a 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the author of seven books, including South to America, winner of the 2022 National Book Award. She is a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and the Hurston Wright Award, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, among others. She has written for The New York Times; The Atlantic; Harpers; O, the Oprah Magazine; New York Magazine; and The Paris Review. Perry earned her PhD in American studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center, and a BA from Yale College in literature and American studies.

Legacy Lit
ISBN-13 978-0306828515

    

Minor Notes, Volume 1 - REVIEW

Edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

Penguin Classics
ISBN-13: 978-0143137269

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song - REVIEW

"For more than 250 years," writes poet and scholar Kevin Young in his introduction to this landmark new anthology, "African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy." Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Cap­turing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Noise Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also fea­tures biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

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. With AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America; October 20, 2020; 978-1­59853-666-9; $45), a monumental new anthology expertly curated by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed for the first time in all its power, beauty. and multiplicity. Here are 675 poems in all, including many never before anthologized, along with newly researched biographies of every poet.

Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an 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 Langston Hughes. Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history-in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective - and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip-hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit the barbershop. and the street.

Taking the measure of the tradition in a single authoritative volume, AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song sets a new standard for a deep, authentic engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

This anthology is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, a yearlong national public humanities initiative that engages participants in a multifaceted exploration of African American poetry; with signature events in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, regional programming in public libraries nationwide, as well as a companion website featuring video readings, commentary, programming support, and much more. Lift Every Voice is presented in partnership with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with generous support from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emerson Collective.

About the editor: Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recently named a National Historic Landmark, and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018) as featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; and Bunk (Graywolf, 2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was longlisted for the National Book Award. and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the editor of nine other volumes, including the Library of America anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January 2021.

 

AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

edited by Kevin Young

Library of America; October 20, 2020

978-1-59853-666-9

U.S. $45.00 / Can. $60.00

www.africanamericanpoetry.org

Now in its fourth decade, Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.

Nebraska: Poems by Kwame Dawes - REVIEW

Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992, he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. 

This beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Nebraska, explores a constant theme in Dawes's work-the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska's discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, and yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant. 

Kwame Dawes is Chancellor's Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska­ Lincoln. He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and author or editor of numerous other books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes's most recent books include the poetry collections City of Bones: A Testament and Punta de Burro and the novel Bivouac. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund, editor of the award-winning African Poetry Book series, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. The winner of numerous awards for his writing and service to the literary community, Dawes was elected a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2,018, and won the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry in 2019. 

Nebraska: Poems by Kwame Dawes
University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 978-1-4962-2123-0 US $19.95 
nebraskapress.unl.edu

"The Tradition" by Jericho Brown

The Tradition by Jericho Brown 
   Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown's daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we've become accustomed to terror, in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither—or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown's work is at its most innovative. His invention of the duplex — a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues — is an all-out exhibition of formal skill, and his lyrics move through elegy and memory with a breathless cadence. Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis. 

Duplex 
I begin with love, hoping to end there. 
I don't want to leave a messy corpse. 
   I don't want to leave a messy corpse 
   Full of medicines that turn in the sun. 
Some of my medicines turn in the sun. 
Some of us don't need hell to be good. 
   Those who need most, need hell to be good.
   What are the symptoms of your sickness?
Here is one symptom of my sickness:
Men who love me are men who miss me. 
   Men who leave me are men who miss me
   In the dream where I am an island.
In the dream where I am an island,
I grow green with hope. I'd like to end there. 

The Tradition poetry by Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press 
ISBN:978-1556594861