These collected works are a celebration of love, pain, rage, hip hop, race, and pop culture. This hodgepodge of topics are merged as one to bring something new and fresh into the poetry medium. The author seamlessly blends social commentary into a rhythmic flow that can be heard with out melodic tones or sonics. This is a deep dive of creativity and originality from a new voice for those in love with the poetic art form. A must read this day and age for the creatives who battle daily with themselves and society.

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. A Friends Fund Publication.

From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father's eyes and through their own.

Arranged chronologically, a comprehensive collection of the verse of Langston Hughes contains 860 poems, including three hundred that have never appeared in book form and commentary by Hughes's biographer.

Three boroughs. Two people. One summer that could change everything. "This is not a love story," she said. "Good. I've never been big on those," he responded. "But this might hurt a little." "Well, then make it hurt good." So begins Ran Walker's 19th book, a collection of microfiction that tells the story of a relationship between two unnamed characters and their romance over the course of a single summer in New York City. Flowing like a mixtape, the collection reads like a concept album, revealing the highs and lows of two people fighting against time to build a relationship that could change them both.

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Whether it's for the comfort, the style, the collectibility, or the investment potential, sneakers play a huge role in pop culture. Ran Walker and Van G. Garrett decided to explore the various aspects of sneaker culture in this collection of microfiction and poetry. More than a celebration of sneaker culture, Can I Kick It? creatively explores everything from that first pair of J's to the latest Yeezy obsession.

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of African-American literary traditions. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.” — from the preface "I was born to grow, / alongside my garden of plants, / poems / like / this one“ So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.

"Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry."--Booklist Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan's -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan's ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in Jordan's lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value." From "These Poems": These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry. June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. After her death in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.