It is the story of a baby—me—during my first fourteen months, leading up to the birth of David. It’s told from the perspective and in the voice of a baby. Each of this small book’s 101 chapters is imagined. Yet, each is rooted in reality, in facts and feelings.
Kelly Norman Ellis
The Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS
Regular price
$17.95
Save $-17.95
As HIV continues to change life on this planet, encouraging tough conversations about sex, sexual orientation, healthy relationships and trust, it invigorates those young and old to challenge the status quo of silence. Editors Kelly Norman Ellis and M.L. Hunter have assembled established and emerging writers and artists from around the globe, such as American Book Award and Pew Fellowship winner Lamont B. Steptoe; renown poet and educator Tony Medina; and Emmy award-winner Kwame Dawes, for this haunting and inspiring collection of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction that paints living portraits of HIV/AIDS.
Sterling Plumpp
Ornate with Smoke
Regular price
$12.95
Save $-12.95
Poetry that comes out of the jazz music of African American artists.
Quraysh Ali Lansana
They Shall Run
Regular price
$10.95
Save $-10.95
These poems trace the journeys of the great Black historical figure Harriet Tubman and her fugitives through the backwoods of America.
Keorapetse Kgositsile
To the Bitter End
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile rejuvenates the African spirit and continues the quest for total and uncompromised liberation.
Sterling Plumpp
Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth
Regular price
$14.95
Save $-14.95
This collection is the third in a trilogy of poetic works created by Sterling Plumpp to allow audiences to explore the language of music articulated through the nuances of jazz, blues, and bebop. The poetry in Velvet Be Bop Kente Cloth utilizes distinct rhythms and a non-conventional use of line and line breaks. It also draws upon the musical innovations established by Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillispie, and others.
T. M. Stringfellow
More Than Dancing
Regular price
$9.95
Save $-9.95
Challenging modern America's perspective on love, history, and race relations, these poems deviate from such techniques as free verse and abstraction to concentrate on structured forms such as odes and Italian sonnets. The unifying idea of the book also comes from the classics: the poet views black artists as Prometheus figures, giving fire and inspiration to American culture even when they are barely acknowledged. The poetry's message, however, is gritty and emotional--and sometimes deliberately sentimental--as it pits the joys of love, romance, and racial pride against the sorrows of slavery and segregation.
Keorapetse Kgositsile
Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
The poems are penned by a South African who observed and absorbed the culture of African Americans. These verses contain his observations of this Black culture and the connections with his native South Africa.
Kahil El' Zabar
Mis Taken Brilliance
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
Mis Taken Brilliance is percussionist extraordinaire Kahil El'Zabar's debut poetry collection. El'Zabar's many moods are expressed in an ecology of rhythm and rifts, harmony and phraseology. El'Zabar is the talking drummer who revels in the textures, the tonality, and beat of life.
Maulana Karenga
Million Man March/Day of Absence
Regular price
$19.95
Save $-19.95
A comprehensive treatment of the 1996 Million Man March using essays, photographs, and poetry.
Useni Eugene Perkins
Memories & Images
Regular price
$12.00
Save $-12.00
Perkins reveals his personal development into his present philosophy as he recounts his childhood, extols his heroes, and sings about the jazz greats.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Longer Than Breath
Regular price
$19.95
Save $-19.95
When I met Toussaint, I was struck instantly by both his name and demeanor. Over the years, it became clear my son-in-law was a new Toussaint, principled warrior, and community leader. This book of poems is an extended conversation between me and his widowed wife, my daughter. So how many Black women have lost life partners, this, however, was not the result of external violence, just the wearing away of his body. Their love remains intact.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Life Sentences
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
Life Sentences: Freeing Black Relationships is a Black man's response to the devastating effect of the Euro-Western concept of love on Black relationships. Author Mzee Lasana Okpara (formerly Fred Hord) demonstrates keen insight and confronts complex contemporary and historical issues which thwart efforts towards genuine bonding between the Black man and woman. Okpara's voice is intimate, challenging, and resolute.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Liberation Narratives
Regular price
$24.95
Save $-24.95
Spanning a long career, these poems helped define and sustain a movement that added music and brash street language to traditional poetics. Like Amiri Barka (aka LeRoi Jones), this poet and social activist has long combined the personal and the political by adding anger, activism, and outsider art to well-crafted poems. Spoken-word poetry (which recently garnered the author a Grammy nomination) and ""message"" poetry aimed at community healing are innovations in the later works, and as a whole the poems provide an overview of emerging black culture as they borrow language from black consciousness, hip-hop, political speeches, and motivational talks.
Cranston Knight
La Brigada
Regular price
$10.00
Save $-10.00
The poems in ""La are"" are about the impact of Spain on La Brigada, the American unit that fought in the Spanish Civil War. As Cranston Knight states, the poems are about ""those who struggled in a time vortex to save millions in a forgotten war, a forgotten country."" To bridge the cultural and language gap in the telling of these stories, Knight includes a selection of the book's poems in both English and Spanish.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
Written in the tradition and style of the Black Arts Movement, this collection contains lyrical poems, laced with satirical allusions and political exhortations to Black readers.
Wade Hudson
Journey
Regular price
$16.95
Save $-16.95
Estella Conwill Majozo
Jiva Telling Rites
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
This is a collection of poems in verse and short prose that tells the story of a woman's anguish and growth in a hostile environment. The poems move into praise songs for people deemed worthy of recognition.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Into Africa, Being Black
Regular price
$19.95
Save $-19.95
This precious volume of new and selected poems justly widens Dr. Hord's space among the poets of the Black Arts Movement. He remains, as John O. Killers would state, one of the long distance runners. He is in a league with Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Jayne Cortez, Eugene Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Kalamu ya Salaam, and others who created a movement that helped to change America and the world for the literate and liberated majority.
Cranston Knight
In the Garden of the Beast
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
Chronicling the lives of an African American soldier, his Vietnamese lover, and their child, this poetry collection deals painfully and poignantly with the reality of the Vietnam war.
Keith Gilyard
Impressions
Regular price
$19.95
Save $-19.95
The heart of this ambitious and energetic collection is the conscientious and trusted mind of a giving and loving Black artist who in his own way understands history, psychology, economics, politics, and, most of all, the unique power of language in his application of “chord inversions” in the use of serving the urgent needs of Black lives. As a poet and empirical scientist who dances with words, ideas, real life, practical clarifications, and humor, Gilyard challenges his readers to act.
Sterling Plumpp
Hornman
Regular price
$8.00
Save $-8.00
""HornMan"" is a poetry collection dedicated to the legendary musician, Von Freeman.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Honoring Genius
Regular price
$19.95
Save $-19.95
For over thirty years, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki R. Madhubuti shared a unique literary and personal relationship. In this latest volume of his work, Madhubuti, a renowned poet in his own right, pays tribute to Brooks' legacy and memory with this collection of poems that he produced during those years. He also offers two essays and a selection of newer poems to express his gratitude and show his great respect for this literary giant.
Sterling Plumpp
Home/Bass
Regular price
$18.95
Save $-18.95
Home/Bass ""brings to the forefront the myriad of folks that inhabit the up-South streets of Chicago or the unaltered roads of Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and other pockets inhabited by Blacks throughout the South. Sterling Plumpp has lived with these folks--sharecroppers, preachers, misplaced Mississippi blues men and women. He has been in their houses, has dined at their tables, and has drunk at the bars on the corners. He is not a stranger to their articulations--voices that call to him from a Natchez cemetery, from the outskirts of some Mississippi Delta town, or settle on Maxwell Street in Chicago--all through the observant and often omnipresent lens of blues artist Willie Kent. Plumpp is always mindful of the slow, steady rhythms of the blues, not as backdrop, but as the foundation and framework on which he structures the components of this book. With the publication of ""Home/Bass, ""Plumpp has once again captured the very essence of language and the blues from the inside out.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Heartlove
Regular price
$10.00
Save $-10.00
These essential meditations on commitment will bring pleasure and reassurance while confirming one's belief in the power of love.