Selected Poems
10 best books like Selected Poems (Claude McKay): Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New, Great Sonnets, Transbluesency: Selected Poems, 1961-1995, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, On Lynchings, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories, Blacks, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry
| Author | Audre Lorde |
| ISBN | 0393309754 |
I didn't love this the way I thought I would, if that makes sense. I've read Lorde's work before, but I never sat down and read a book of her poetry, cover-to-cover. After a while they all seemed to be the same poem, and they were so heavy with metaphor that I often didn't know what she was trying to say.
These...
| Author | Paul Negri |
| ISBN | 0486280527 |
Treasury of over 170 English and American sonnets by more than 70 poets, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge,...
| Author | Amiri Baraka |
| ISBN | 1568860145 |
Finally in print in a single volume, a selection from Baraka's mostly out-of-print collections of poetry, from 1961 to the present. Starting with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and concluding with recent limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, this selection traces the more than thirty...
| Author | Paul Laurence Dunbar |
| ISBN | 0813914388 |
Major Field Prep: 22/133
This 1994 collected edition of Dunbar's poetry reprints the 1913 Completed Works and adds an addition 60 or so poems that were not included in that posthumous volume. Dunbar's poetry takes on a wide variety of styles, genres, and forms and the most distinct difference in...
| Author | Marilyn Hacker |
| ISBN | 0393312259 |
Anyone who has ever been in love ought to read this book. Any woman who has ever been in love with another woman absolutely must read this book. Anyone who believes form in poetry trite will be changed by this book (and by Hacker's poetry in general).
I have heard Hacker read her work; each word is...
| Author | Ida B. Wells-Barnett |
| ISBN | 1591020085 |
Though the end of the Civil War brought legal emancipation to blacks, it is a fact of history that their social oppression continued long after. The most virulent form of this ongoing persecution was the practice of lynching carried out by mob rule, often as local law enforcement officials looked the...
| Author | Nella Larsen |
| ISBN | 0385721005 |
A light-skinned beauty who spends years passing for white finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem neighborhood. A restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. A mother's confrontation with tragedy...
| Author | Gwendolyn Brooks |
| ISBN | 0883781050 |
Here is a necessary collection of poetry for admirers of words and treasurers of literary beauty. Spanning more than 30 years, this collection of literary masterpieces by the venerable Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks, arguably Illinois' most beloved Poet Laureate and Chicago's elder black literary stateswoman,...
| Author | Helen Vendler |
| ISBN | 0312257066 |
“Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.” It didn't take me long while reading Helen Vendler's introduction to poetry to remember this quote from Wallace Stevens, as so much of the best poetry deals with the flouting of conventions and the subverting of cliches. Perhaps the formulaic...
| Author | Essex Hemphill |
| ISBN | 1573441015 |
I recently found out about Essex Hemphill while I was frontlisting up-coming titles. In case you also didn't know, he was a black, gay poet and activist in the 80s and 90s who died from AIDS in the mid 90s. I found out that one of his most well known works was Ceremonies and of course, it's out of print. But my...
| Author | C.D. Wright |
| ISBN | 1556592582 |
"For a long while now, C. D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical...
| Author | Sonia Sanchez |
| ISBN | 1893996808 |
“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.”—Isabel Allende
A reprint of Sonia Sanchez’s award-winning collection, which contains some of her seminal work. Winner of the American Book Award.
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, and scholar...
From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America's acknowledged poet of color, the first to commemorate the experience--and suffering--of African-Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. In this, his last collection of verse, Hughes's...
| Author | Cornelius Eady |
| ISBN | 0399147209 |
Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America.
"A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families."--The Village...
This is the original source of the "like a shining city on a hill" meme that conservatives like to pose as a model for the United States, apparently unaware that the rest of the text is full of stuff they would denounce as socialism (e.g. "...the care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which,...
| Author | Arna Bontemps |
| ISBN | 0807063371 |
This is a most impressive, wonderful, lyrical and engaging historical novel about one of the first recorded slave revolts in America. Writing at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, Bontemps benefits both from previous writers in that movement as well as the modernist experimentation of William...
The extraordinary writings of Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl turned published poet
In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with...
| Author | William Wordsworth |
| ISBN | 1428604170 |
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment...
| Author | Édouard Glissant |
| ISBN | 0472066293 |
Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his...
| Author | James Weldon Johnson |
One of my favourite poets, James Weldon Johnson, edited this anthology of African-American poetry, which was published in 1922. I was impressed by this collection and the vision that James Weldon Johnson had in compiling it; he desired African-Americans to be proud of their heritage, and he realized...
| Author | Zora Neale Hurston |
| ISBN | 1569247439 |
A delightful collection portraying the energy and dynamism of black culture includes the noted author's early works and follows her evolution into a literary genius and contains such stories as Muttsy, Isis, Spunk, and more.
These eight stories - which include intense love stories, stories...
