I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
It’s funny because he wanted to call it My Nigs, but didn't like the idea of white people saying, I loved your collection My Nigs!
That first poem “My President” just floored me with how he heralded all his friends by nominating them for office, like “the boys outside Walgreens selling candy/ for a possibly fictional basketball team” or the guy who hooks him up with a free slice of pizza as long as Danez gives him time to say salat.
There’s a poem about getting beat up, at once an act of violence and an act of care for while they're beating you up, they’re weirdly making sure they don’t kill you.
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY
Danez Smith is our president
Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can…
I first came across this poet at a conference in Tennessee. You know you're legit when even the fiction writers are like, you need to read this guy.
The poem “Mexican Heaven” is about what heaven would be like if it were inhabited by all Mexicans. It’s hilarious and wise. He has this other poem about being disciplined by his dad, which captures the immigrant experience–how your dad beats you, but in the punishment is a strange form of love.
Olivarez is nice with it. His poems have rhythm and prowess, but they are also palatable in a way that doesn't sacrifice craft.
In this stunning debut, poet Jose Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Combining wry humour with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender,class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Eve wrote a separate poem to incarcerated youth encouraging them to embrace their emotionality.
She said their tears were rain that they showed existed. It is a powerful poem, an incredible gesture to those working to overcome personal battles. Electric Arches, similarly, is everything you’d hope that a millennial would write. It updates the culture.
She has this poem about Emmett Till as an old man grocery shopping. The normalcy of this imagined life is the sadness of the piece. It basically said that if this man were alive, he'd be a regular guy going about his errands.
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances - Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. Electric Arches invites conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
If you want a mix tape full of vibrant poets, this anthology has everybody and their mother.
Some of the cats I mentioned in the entries above plus Mahogany Browne, Fatima Ashgar, and so on. Word smiths respected by the literary scene and those hailed by the spoken word movement. If you're interested in the postmodern Hip-hop canon, this is the book for you.
Just as blues influenced the Harlem Renaissance and jazz influenced the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop's musical and cultural force has shaped the aesthetics of and given rise to a new generation of American poets. Edited by poets Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop is the first anthology of poetry from the hip-hop generation. The Breakbeat Poets are multigenerational and multiracial, employing traditional and wild style poetics to narrate a new landscape.
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
God bless Neruda, old school favorite of all time. Everybody knows his love poems, but this dude's other poems were equally off the wall.
I guess the social activists would love “El Pueblo” which describes one working man and every working man all the same, how they are invisible but steadfast with their hammers on the coal, laboring day to day making the world go round. It’s the most wonderful memorial.
I also love his odes – “Ode to Criticism” the first one which is like, critics suck and then the second version which is like, well, maybe critics have some worth. There’s “Ode to the Dictionary”, too. We need to resurrect this man, for real.
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez).
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."
This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many…
At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals, or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification—never far from anyone’s mind—is ticking louder now than ever.
In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure. We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band, they rob the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive pegasus. Thanks to Marani’s mysterious invulnerability,…
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and…
