Edited by Kevin Young
Library of America
10/20/2020, hardcover
SKU: 9781598536669
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present
Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.
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 like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.
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 Room 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. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.
Reviews:
"It is overwhelming to contemplate the variety and history contained in this volume. The poems gathered here have the force of event. They were written as acts of public mourning, and as secrets; they are love poems and bitter quarrels. They are prized company." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"This vast anthology gathers voices both canonical and overlooked to build an implicit but unassailable case that Black poetry is central to American literature." -- New York Times Book Review
"Young, himself an acclaimed author of poetry and prose, has created a document both breathtaking and inspiring, historical and personal." --TIME magazine (The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020)
"A remarkable anthology. . . . Including more than 240 poets, [African American Poetry] moves through eight periods, illustrating the various movements in this vast canon right up to our present moment." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post
"The giants are well represented in this enormous collection, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove and Natasha Tretheway. But so are more than 200 other poets worthy of wider recognition." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (33 Books to Read this Fall)
"New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young takes on the monumental task of condensing 250 years of African-American poetry into this must-own anthology... Discover it." --THE WEEK (21 Books to Read this Fall)
"This thousand-page collection should be required reading for all Americans." --San Francisco Chronicle
About the Editor:
Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the former curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His books of poetry include Brown, Dear Darkness, and Jelly Roll: A Blues. He has previously edited the anthology Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and, for Library of America, John Berryman: Selected Poems. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January 2021.