More than seventy poets are represented in this innovative new anthology of African American poetry since the 1960s. This is not just another poetry anthology. It is a gathering of poems that demonstrate what happens when writers in a marginalized community collectively turn from dedicating their writing to political, social, and economic struggles, and instead devote themselves to the art of their poems and to the ideas they embody. These poets bear witness to the interior landscapes of their own individual selves or examine the private or personal worlds of invented personae and, therefore, of human beings living in our modern and postmodern worlds. The anthology focuses on post-1960s poetry and includes such poets as Rita Dove, Ai, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Terrence Hayes, Elizabeth Alexander, Major Jackson, Carl Phillips, Harryette Mullen, and Yusef Komunyakaa―artists who, using a wide range of styles and forms, are cultivating a poetry of personal voice and interiority that speaks against the backdrop of community and anscestry. This spirited and substantial anthology confirms an inadequately appreciated literary phenomenon: African American poetry is flourishing. As Rowell asserts in his informative opening commentary, there is profound depth, imagination, hard truths, beauty, a vital spectrum of feelings, and “linguistic energy and agility” to be found in the work of the 86 distinct, groundbreaking poets showcased here. Organized chronologically, the collection begins with such “precursors” as Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, black arts movement poets, including Nikki Giovanni and Haki Madhubuti, and such pillars as Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Rowell then rolls out the “Heirs” in three successive waves of poets writing in the 1980s up to the present, netting such stars as Elizabeth Alexander, Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, and Terrance Hayes along with incandescent emerging writers. Illuminating poet statements enhance the resonance of this magnificent gathering of poems subtle and declarative, intense and mischievous in their response to questions of inheritance and independence, community and self, life bitter and sweet. Poems, in which, as Tracy K. Smith writes, “each word is a wish.” --Donna Seaman "An excellent anthology, a page-turner." ― Jordan Davis, The Nation Charles Henry Rowell is the founder and editor of the premier literary and cultural journal of the African diaspora, Callaloo . He is a professor of English at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he lives. Used Book in Good Condition