EIGHT: AFTER THE HURRICANE 2009-2020. How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This / Hanif Abdurraqib -- La Negra Takes Medusa to the Hair Salon / Elizabeth Acevedo -- Cento Between the Ending and the End / Cameron Awkward-Rich -- America Will Be / Joshua Bennett -- A Postmodern Two-Step / Reginald Dwayne Betts -- upon viewing the death of basquiat / Mahogany L. Browne -- Massa's House / Dominique Christina -- Nashville / Tiana Clark -- Dear _____, / DeLana R. A. Dameron -- My First Black Nature Poem(TM) / LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs -- I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store / Eve L. Ewing -- Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas / Sean Hill -- (Afterward) One Corner More / Notes on a Letter to the Singer Abbey Lincoln from Her Lover, Abraham Lincoln / Harmony Holiday -- After the Hurricane / Ishion Hutchinson -- Kansas / Gary Jackson -- Kudzu / Saeed Jones -- The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings / Donika Kelly -- One Country / Rickey Laurentiis -- Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face / Shane McCrae -- Closer / Anis Mojgani -- #sayhername / Aja Monet -- The President's Wife / Morgan Parker -- Violins / Rowan Ricardo Phillips -- History / Camille Rankine -- Black Can Sleep / Justin Phillip Reed -- Children Listen / Roger Reeves -- Why Is We Americans / Alison C. Rollins -- Object Permanence / Nicole Sealey -- Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968 / Charif Shanahan -- Fisherman's Daughter / Safiya Sinclair -- dinosaurs in the hood / Danez Smith -- Your National Anthem / Clint Smith -- Prayer / Phillip B. Williams -- Ode to Herb Kent / Jamila Woods.
Summary, etc.:
Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate resistance to slavery. This volume captures the power and beauty of this diverse tradition and its challenge to American poetry and culture. Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Noise Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. The volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events-- adapted from dust jacket.
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