Poetry

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to Don't Stop Believin'. It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside--from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs--to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

About: Things of Love, Life, Singleness and Other Stuff is a collection of over 70 poems that helped me navigate through challenges in my life; like the loss of love, finding my purpose, dealing with depression, dating and singleness. It also embraces the joys of love, family, contentment, wholeness and life lessons. It uses humor, sarcasm, hope and introspection to carve out deep emotions that can only be interpreted through poetry. About will take you on a journey to some places that are not always pleasant, but will identify areas of joy, healing, promise and praise. Maybe you will see yourself or someone else in these writings. I hope that it will help you unlock some of the complicated experiences in your own life. The key is to not be afraid to do the work.

About: Things of Love, Life, Singleness and Other Stuff is a collection of over 70 poems that helped me navigate through challenges in my life; like the loss of love, finding my purpose, dealing with depression, dating and singleness. It also embraces the joys of love, family, contentment, wholeness and life lessons. It uses humor, sarcasm, hope and introspection to carve out deep emotions that can only be interpreted through poetry. About will take you on a journey to some places that are not always pleasant, but will identify areas of joy, healing, promise and praise. Maybe you will see yourself or someone else in these writings. I hope that it will help you unlock some of the complicated experiences in your own life. The key is to not be afraid to do the work.

Theresa A. Burrage was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts from Wilberforce University and studied creative writing, art and self-publishing at Lancaster University in Lancaster, England. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Poetic Voices of America and Free to Fly. She was on one of Cleveland’s National Poetry Slam teams, which placed 3rd out of 33 teams. She wrote copy for retail accounts at Liggett-Stashower Advertising and has a gospel rap CD for children titled Lyrics for the Soul.

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.