Poetry

Purchase is for those who are grieving, who feel frightened by the world's meanness, who are solitary. It is for those who, even in the midst of mourning, find themselves distracted from despair by the natural world. It is for everyone looking to find...

"The old time Negro preacher of parts was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor. He knew the secret of oratory, that at the bottom of it is a progression of rhythmic words more than anything else. ...He often possessed a voice that was a...

Hailed by Arnold Rampersad as "[Hughes'] most brilliant book of poems," Fine Clothes to the Jew is the stunning sophomore collection of poetry that--in conjunction with The Weary Blues--solidified Langston Hughes as a literary powerhouse.Originally...

Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. SpellmanA. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and...

A surreal poetry collection considering memory and self-discovery through the character of the archon, the keeper of the mental archive. In Ruth Ellen Kocher's Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site...

In her thought-provoking debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, Ashley Elizabeth invites the reader into the depths of her childhood, marked by tragedies including childhood sexual assault, ailing parents, and the loss of innocence. With raw...

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through...

With fierce candor and an unflinching eye, the highly praised author of Push journeys through the harsh realities of African American existence to find the "door to the possibility of now." The heroes that emerge from these forty-seven vigorous poems...

Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home Jorrell Watkins's debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States's fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in PlayHouse...

Have you ever felt incomplete? Like something was just...missing? Rose takes us on an emotional journey through Ink Blot Girl as she learns how to make space for herself and define what belonging means to her. As the poetry unfolds, Rose gently asks us...

"Love lodged itself in my throat as a truth unacknowledged, but in order to survive, I had to grow around it. I had to bloom without you."bloom is a collection that explores heartbreak through the personal and political. These poems play...

The snap, pop, and roar of Bonita Lee Penn's poetry carries readers through the fires of time. This remarkable collection reflects themes of urgency similar to those of the Black Arts Movement. Her poems call out names, explore oppression within and...

"Coe writes like a man with polished wings, flying above it all while watching the high and low tides of life." - E. Ethelbert Miller, co-editor, Poet Lore magazineCharles Coe's latest collection of poetry, Coe is renowned for his powerful readings and...

From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks's second collection explores the question "where do our desires take us?"An offspring of Audre Lorde's seminal essay "Uses of the Erotic," Hicks's A Map of My Want follows a nonbinary femme...

Can we be lonely together? Asks r.h. Sin in this heartbreaking collection of poetry. A Midnight Moon is a moving collection of poetry from celebrated bestselling author r.h. Sin. With the honesty and transparency that he has become known for, Sin takes...