Poetry

""HornMan"" is a poetry collection dedicated to the legendary musician, Von Freeman.

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.

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.

Poetry from Writers in Stateville Prison

This short volume of poetry shows the inner self of an African American artist.

The poems in Emmett Till in Different States span more than 7 decades of events in Emmett Till’s legacy from the 1940s to the present. In them Philip Kolin shows how Emmett Till’s importance has expanded from being a Civil Rights martyr to becoming a choric, heroic commentator on the tragedies of Civil Rights injustices (e.g. Medgar Evers’s murder, the Freedom Riders, the murders of Chicago’s children, Trayvon Martin), and a voice of conscience for America to hear and heed. The title of this collection points to the multiple ways we can see Emmett Till through time and space (e.g. geographic, historical, psychological, and theological.) Kolin weaves other voices throughout the poems in this collection, most notably Mamie Till, Gospel great Mahalia Jackson who bought Till’s gravestone, an old black woman (Aunt Aretha) who meets Till in the Delta, Till’s fictionalized brothers (other black men who have been slain and their bodies left to rot), his fictionalized sister based upon the Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs, the Chicago River, and even Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whom Till was said to have offended. These voices–and Till’s as well–emerge from a variety of traditions–Biblical, the blues, classical mythology, spirituals. According to Natasha Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, “In the history of a nation still on the long journey toward full realization of its creed, there are stories that need to be told again and again. The murder of Emmett Till is one such story; it belongs to all of us and should be sung by many different voices. In Emmett Till in Different States, Philip Kolin adds his voice—a necessary retelling so that we might be transformed by the listening.”

Intertwining wit, satire, sensitivity, and rich verbal imagery, this collection of free verse celebrates the triumph of Black culture.

The poems in this collection address the cultural and spiritual needs of Black people. In Dawnsong! Toure successfully develops a heroic poetry that creates its own artistic matrix. In these poems Toure takes the reader back to ancient Egypt and, at the same time, demonstrates the relevance of Egyptian history and, at the same time, demonstrates the relevance of Egyptian history and mythology to the lives of contemporary Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.

Emerging with a varied political sensibility, this book explodes the bourgeois self-indulgence of American culture to give a lambasting critique of its current global ultra-exploration and political repression. Exploring pressing and complicated social issues, the book incorporates humor, invective, and vigor while analyzing life, beauty, and the defiance of denial and despair.

The symbiotic relationship between poems and paintings is explored in this stimulating volume. As a premiere example of convergence art, in which two or more different kinds of art react to and interact with one another, the collection draws a comparison between multidisciplinary art and multiculturalism by equating medium with race. By pairing the work of a renowned poet and public artist with the paintings of a beloved children's book illustrator, the book shows how effectively art can take a multimedia approach and yet convey a single message: how new historical and cultural possibilities can arise when differing disciplines work together, whether referring to different kinds of art or different kinds of people.

Best known for his anthologies on Black literature and his scholarship on Black life and culture, Richard A. Long’s own creative writing would have remained obscure and under represented had it not been for Eleanor Traylor, Sterling Brown Professor and Graduate Professor of English at Howard University, who asked Third World Press to produce a commemorative edition of Ascending and Other Poems. As a tribute to Long and to his legacy, this slim volume of verse introduces this poet to an entirely new audience. Ascending and Other Poems originally produced through the DuSable Museum of African American History under the guidance of Margaret Burroughs engaged his followers in the mid 1970s. Today almost thirty years later, it still engages and challenges readers with profound revelations and alluring language.