Joy, rage, despair, love, sadness—poets can take these emotions and turn them into something that inspires, empowers, and heals with their wonderful way with words. Their poems can feel like a balm rich with healing powers. American’s racist history didn’t get in the way of Black poets. Instead, they faced what came their way and wrote and rhymed on it.
It is hard to imagine the Black experience without poetry. Children learn their parents’ favorite poems that their parents recited to them, and so on. Hubs of poets have always been welcomed in Black communities all over the country. This collection features wonderful poets who offer safe, beautiful spaces in an ever-changing, challenging world.
Listen now: Nikki Giovanni's exclusive poem for Audible:
"Lemonade Grows From Soil Too"
From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself, and us, home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
In Olio Live, a very special one-night performance recorded live at the Minetta Lane Theater in February 2019, poet Tyehimba Jess introduces listeners to his 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Olio. A stellar cast of actors, accompanied by pianist Jeremy Gill, performs a selection of poems from the collection, all of which reinterpret the lived experience of real historical figures. The triumphant performances of Olio Live ask listeners to consider the nature of identity, performance, and ever-present history. Tyehimba Jess and Yahdon Israel immortalize and embody a long tradition of African American "citizenship through musicianship" in this timeless live audio.
Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular: its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy. These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic and it shouldn’t be.
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Jericho Brown's daring 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.
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, this luminous poetry collection by bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead. In 70 poems bearing the same title, Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first 200 days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's 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.
Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Including the beloved “Phenomenal Woman”, the poems collected here in Angelou’s third book of verse are powerful, distinctive, and fresh—and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it.
Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's 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.
This groundbreaking work of literature debuted on Broadway in 1976 and was adapted into a star-studded 2010 film. It is brought to life in audio in this powerful and moving performance by one of the film's stars, acclaimed actress Thandie Newton. Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. Now an audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.
Nikki Giovanni was known as The Poet of the Revolution. When she took the stage, the world stopped to listen to her riff on injustice and racism. In this title, she turns her attention and talents to the subject of love, the bitter and the sweet, and the erotic. Nikki Giovanni reveals the mysteries of her own heart, and peeks into her friendship with Maya Angelou. Included is "All Eyes on U," a poem she wrote for Tupac Shakur, with love.
What elevates Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam, reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times—as in Tayeb Salih's work—and translating to the realm of lyric the work of the likes of Nawal El Saadawi. As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own"; in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, Warsan's debut, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly.
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (New York Times), Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing his 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 post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon.”
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. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful collection. 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. These 32 taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi "barkeep, activist, waiter" Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle "De La Soul Is Dead," about the days when hip-hop was growing up, remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story.
The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and déjà vu and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You're gonna give us the love we need.
Langston Hughes was only 24 when he published his debut collection of poetry, The Weary Blues. The poems included here blend vernacular speech and musical rhythms to offer a bracing perspective on the African American experience. Traversing a wide range of settings—including the jazz clubs of Harlem, expansive natural landscapes, and seaside taverns—Hughes’s voice as a poet ties these various places together, exploring the depth of the soul in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the pain of endurance in “Mother to Son,” and death in the title poem’s haunting requiem for a weary blues singer. This audiobook is read by acclaimed performer Dion Graham.
