Black Boy Poems is a revolutionary literary experience. Imagine the mind of Huey P. Newton mixed with the poetic eloquence of "Black Thought from the Roots." If you can, then you'll begin to approach the marrow of what's inscribed on these pages. Tyson Amir weaves the black experience and, the life and wisdom of Richard Wright with radical social political commentary to inspire black liberation.
Poetry. California Interest, African & African American Studies. Contributors include Samuel Getachew, Nicos Hubbard-Riley, Elijah I. Hynson, Damion Evans, Charles Hall, and Daniel Summerhill. BLACK JOY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK BOY POEMS is an unapologetic, unrestrained, and defiant celebration of culture, friendship, and community. This compilation of poems by black boys from Oakland is an elaborate and heartwarming guide through the intricacies of what it means to be young, black, and undoubtedly alive in today's day and age.
Six-time Coretta Scott King Award winner and four-time Caldecott Honor recipient Bryan Collier brings this classic, inspirational poem to life, written by poet Useni Eugene Perkins. Hey black child, Do you know who you are? Who really are?Do you know you can be What you want to be If you try to be What you can be? This lyrical, empowering poem celebrates black children and seeks to inspire all young people to dream big and achieve their goals.
A collection of poems that grows out of the American Southwest focusing on family and community life of the barrio sharing births and deaths, neighbors and seasons, and injustices and victories.
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
"These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way—saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."—Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."—Rain Taxi
Poetry. African American Studies. Asian American Studies. LGBT Studies. Winner of the Publishing Triangle's 2010 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the 13th Annual Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. "I applaud Ronaldo Wilson's pathbreaking movement into what has never, never, in history, been said. About sexuality, in particular, these poems speak with incorrigible and raving clarity. And, always, they display intellectual curiosity, and an impatient, gorgeous readiness to make language new." Wayne Koestenbaum " A] warning to anyone tempted to believe that in objectification lies freedom. Livid inside an apocalyptic negative capability, these poems are constructed through their maker's deconstruction, and reading, I too, felt unmade." Claudia Keelan "Ronaldo Wilson's POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT turns the parenthetical inside out, contents kicking and alive, person, race and being: where fate is in store in you, not for you, out there; in consciousness, and barely conscious, where consciousness is the accumulation of the scarcely discernible experiences. Wilson's poems captures states of person, the thinking being, the being thinking, the being perceived, and all the slippage between stages of person, Black and on the page, folding and unfolding layers of social construction." Erica Hunt "The force here is in the erotic attachment between the human figures certainly but also (and more surprisingly) between history and present-day experience. Ronaldo Wilson teases the reader with earnestness while he refracts event and experience. The effect is dazzling. The poems are panoramic. One part slave narrative, one part pillow book, POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT is a triumph of the social lyric: violent, tender, absurd." G.E Patterson "For all the disturbances examined in this intensely lucid book of bodily desire, dead porn stars, and the high art of human survival, the voice of these poems manages to maintain a kind of giddy composure. Perhaps the trick of it comes through his sense that, 'pattern organizes trauma, and so does speed.' It's not so fast, the pace here; we're made to look, to see, with shrewd intention. It's that Ronaldo Wilson's writing doesn't let you get too comfortable. It shifts experience and reckoning from poem to essay, theory to epistle, these intuitive modes of a person in search of a particular poetics, darting around sharp visions that could bloody or shine on the tempestuous landscape 'the black object' emerges from." Tisa Bryant"
Digte. Addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity
Praise for Saeed Jones: "Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."—FlavorWire "I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."—D. A. Powell "Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poems don't dole out mercy. Mr. Jones undoubtedly dipped his pen in fierce before crafting these stanzas that rock like backslap. Straighten your skirt, children. The doors of the church are open."—Patricia Smith "It's a big book, a major book. A game-changer. Dazzling, brutal, real. Not just brilliant, caustic, and impassioned but a work that brings history—in which the personal and political are inter-constitutive—to the immediate moment. Jones takes a reader deep into lived experience, into a charged world divided among unstable yet entrenched lines: racial, gendered, political, sexual, familial. Here we absorb each quiet resistance, each whoop of joy, a knowledge of violence and of desire, an unbearable ache/loss/yearning. This is not just a "new voice" but a new song, a new way of singing, a new music made of deep grief's wildfire, of burning intelligence and of all-feeling heart, scorched and seared. In a poem, Jones says, "Boy's body is a song only he can hear." But now that we have this book, we can all hear it. And it's unforgettable."—Brenda Shaughnessy "Inside each hunger, each desire, speaks the voice of a boy that admits "I've always wanted to be dangerous." This is not a threat but a promise to break away from the affliction of silence, to make audible the stories that trouble the dimensions of masculinity and discomfort the polite conversations about race. With impressive grace, Saeed Jones situates the queer black body at the center, where his visibility and vulnerability nurture emotional strength and the irrepressible energy to claim those spaces that were once denied or withheld from him. Prelude to a Bruise is a daring debut."—Rigoberto González From "Sleeping Arrangement": Take your hand out from under my pillow. And take your sheets with you. Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts. I can't have you rattling the bed springs so keep still, keep quiet. Mistake yourself for shadows. Learn the lullabies of lint. Saeed Jones works as the editor of BuzzfeedLGBT.
