Poetry

Icon of women's movement and author of over twenty books, including a narrative series on love, bell hooks reminds us of the good and bad moments we spend in love through her inspiring poetry. When Angels Speak of Love is a book of 50 love poems by the...

The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing...

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night--the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets--is back in print.The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she's become one of the most...

For the Love of Black Men is a triumph...filled with power - with poems reflecting the rich traditions and complexity of today's black society. For the Love of Black Men is a thought-provoking, hard-hitting book of poetry that offers renderings of past...

The electrifying body of poems in Tony Medina's Death, With Occasional Smiling speaks with blood-soaked lips. The poet pulls us up from our knees, from the ashes of American history, imagination, and memory, so that we can listen to the clarions of what...

Explore, through 65 poems and letters, the depths of black mental health, belief in a higher power, stimulant usage, reliance on family, and love. With an emphasis on the mental, physical, and spiritual resilience of black people, it relates the journey...

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version...

Winner Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career. Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez's...

Award-winning poet and playwright Idris Goodwin interrogates and remixes our cultural past in order to make sense of our present and potential futures. "Situated squarely in the oral traditions of hip-hop and breakbeat poetry, Idris Goodwin's work...

In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but...

"In Point Blank, we are given an intimate look at one man's inner and outer life, but there's no navel-gazing nonsense. There's always an awareness, implied or explicit, of the sociopolitical crucible. With language both tough-minded and...

Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka--"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" ("New York Times")--was one of the preeminent...

A dazzling collection of 810 haiku, the rigorous 17-syllable Japanese poem, by the famed author of "Native Son" and "Black Boy".

Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda's love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner's oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images...

Phenomenal Woman is a phenomenal poem that speaks to us of where we are as women at the dawn of a new century. In a clear voice, Maya Angelou vividly reminds us of our towering strength and beauty. Here is a poem that radiates wisdom and conviction,...

Rhythmic lyrical poems that embody black music, existence, and tragedy. The poems in this collection center on the word "dub," which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings--to bestow, vest, crown, and also to...