. .-from "Notes From"In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers."Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." --Chicago Tribune

    Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

    Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

    Leeming, Baldwin's friend for 25 years, accessed all of Baldwin's private papers to bring readers closer than ever to the complex man who struggled out of Harlem to become a legend of American literature. Photos.

    In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.

    This is the poetry of a beautiful life.

    Her last relationship almost killed her and she haven't gotten over it. Seeking a fresh start she moves to the city of Atlanta, to be around her family and best friend. With her fresh start comes new opportunities and chances to have some much needed fun. Not looking for love, love finds her. Micah Bass is the hottest rich kid in Atlanta. Named Atlanta's bachelor of the year, he finds himself wanting to settle down again after going through a terrible divorce. He's ready to trust again and thinks he's found the perfect woman to share his life with. Will a little white lie threaten to tear her from his arms? Both Micah and Jordyn's lives are turned into a world wind romance. But when each of their past threatens to tear them apart, will their love for one another be strong enough to endure?

    In 'Destined to Witness', Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir -- an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Führer's spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door -- or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi's account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

    Christian Hawkey's VENTRAKL folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into a ground-breaking collaboration with the 19th / early 20th century German Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors--one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead--wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation--including mistranslation--is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life.

    It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history – the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

    As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century. "A searching, vivid, and (as the title suggests) complex account of Garvey's short but consequential life." --Steve Hahn, The New Republic "The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant.... Grant's book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history.... Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated." --New York Times Book Review "Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s 'Back to Africa' movement.... Grant's learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page. A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders." --Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "This splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Grant's strength lies in his ability to re-create political moods and offer compelling sketches of colorful individuals and their organizations.... An engaging and readable introduction to a complicated and contentious historical actor who, in his time, possessed a unique capacity to inspiredevotion and hatred, adulation and fear." --Chicago Tribune "A monumental, nuanced and broadly sympathetic portrait." --Financial Times

    Today he’s chair of their School of the Arts film division. Jamal Joseph’s personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Riker’s Island and Leavenworth to the halls of Columbia—is as gripping as it is inspiring.Eddie Joseph was a high school honor student, slated to graduate early and begin college. But this was the late 1960s in Bronx’s black ghetto, and fifteen-year-old Eddie was introduced to the tenets of the Black Panther Party, which was just gaining a national foothold. By sixteen, his devotion to the cause landed him in prison on the infamous Rikers Island—charged with conspiracy as one of the Panther 21 in one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the sixties. When exonerated, Eddie—now called Jamal—became the youngest spokesperson and leader of the Panthers’ New York chapter.He joined the “revolutionary underground,” later landing back in prison. Sentenced to more than twelve years in Leavenworth, he earned three degrees there and found a new calling. He is now chair of Columbia University’s School of the Arts film division—the very school he exhorted students to burn down during one of his most famous speeches as a Panther.In raw, powerful prose, Jamal Joseph helps us understand what it meant to be a soldier inside the militant Black Panther movement. He recounts a harrowing, sometimes deadly imprisonment as he charts his path to manhood in a book filled with equal parts rage, despair, and hope.

    

    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

    Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.