April 2025 “Leisure Reads”
“April’s Leisure Reads celebrates National Poetry Month with works from notable African American poets from the 19th century to today. This includes Nikki Giovanni, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Cornelius Eady, and more!” Joshua Zeller
Print Titles:
The 100 Best African American Poems by Nikki Giovanni
“Immerse yourself in the heart and soul of African American literature with The 100 Best African American Poems. This diverse anthology offers a vibrant tapestry of voices that echoes centuries of struggle, triumph, and profound insight. The 100 Best African American Poems is a riveting exploration of African American life, culture, and history, as seen through the lens of poetry. The anthology spans different periods and styles, showcasing the richness and variety of African American poetic expression. From legendary poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou to contemporary voices pushing the boundaries of poetic art, Giovanni's expertly curated selection provides a comprehensive view of the African American poetic tradition. Each poem is a lyrical journey that invites readers to engage with poignant themes, stirring narratives, and powerful emotions.” – Publisher’s Summary
African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century by Joan R. Sherman
“In this bestselling companion to her pioneering study, Invisible Poets, Joan Sherman continues to make new generations aware of the 'invisible' legacy of nineteenth-century black American poetry. The 171 poems here, by thirty-five men and women, have been transcribed from first editions and are annotated in detail.” – Publisher’s Summary. Includes poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and more!
Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid by Nikki Giovanni
“The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred social justice movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations about the reality of life—especially Black life—in America. One of the foremost African-American writers and activists of her generation, she has been hailed as a healer and a sage, a powerful voice on issues of race, equality, violence, and discrimination. With Chasing Utopia, Giovanni demands that the prosaic—flowers, food, birdsong, winter—be seen as poetic, and reaffirms once again why she is as energetic, ‘remarkable’ (Gwendolyn Brooks), ‘wonderful’ (Marian Wright Edelman), ‘outspoken, prolific, energetic’ (New York Times), and relevant as ever.” – Publisher’s Summary
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Gwendolyn Brooks
“‘If you wanted a poem,’ wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.’ From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.” – Publisher’s Summary
It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time by Angela Jackson
“Angela Jackson’s latest collection of poetry borrows its title from a lyric in Barbara Lewis’s 1963 hit single ‘Hello Stranger,’ recorded at Chess Records in Chicago. Like the song, Jackson’s poems are a melodic ode to the African American experience, informed by both individual lives and community history, from the arrival of the first African slave in Virginia in 1619 to post-Obama America. It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time reflects the maturity of Jackson’s poetic vision. The Great Migration, the American South, and Chicago all serve as signposts, but it is the complexity of individual lives—both her own and those who have gone before, walk beside, and come after—that invigorate this collection. Upon surveying so vast a landscape, Jackson finds that sorrow meets delight, and joy lifts up anger and despair. And for all this time, love is the agent, the wise and just rule and guide.” – Publisher’s Summary
To Repel Ghosts: Remixed from the Original Masters by Kevin Young
“In spare, jazzlike verse Kevin Young tells the story of Basquiat's rise from the mock prophet and graffiti artist SAMO to one of the hottest painters of the 1980s (‘blue-chip Basquiat / playing the bull / market’), exploring the artist's bouts with fame and heroin, mourning his untimely death, and celebrating his legacy. Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him.” – Publisher’s Summary
A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson
“In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr’s wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to ‘speak what we see.’” – Publisher’s Summary
Ebooks:
The Book of Light (ebook) by Lucille Clifton
“Though The Book of Light opens with thirty-nine names for light, we soon learn the most meaningful name is Lucille—daughter, mother, proud Black woman. Known for her ability to convey multitudes in few words, Clifton writes into the shadows—her father’s violations, a Black neighborhood bombed, death, loss—all while illuminating the full spectrum of human emotion: grief and celebration, anger and joy, empowerment and so much grace. A meeting place of myth and the Divine, The Book of Light exists “between starshine and clay” as Clifton’s personas allow us to bear the world’s weight with Atlas and witness conversations between Lucifer and God. While names and dates mark this text as a social commentary responding to her time, it is haunting how easily this collection serves as a political palimpsest of today. We leave these poems inspired—Clifton shows us Superman is not our hero. Our hero is the Black female narrator who decides to live. And what a life she creates! ‘Won’t you celebrate with me?’” – Publisher’s Summary
Collected Poems (ebook) by Robert Earl Hayden
“Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award.... In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice―characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern―is a seminal one in American life and literature.” – Publisher’s Summary
The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (ebook) by Sterling A. Brown
“Sterling A. Brown was renowned for his trenchant poetry and scholarship on African American folklife. A contemporary of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, Brown became the first poet laureate of the District of Columbia. His celebrated works, including Southern Road, address issues of race through collages of narrative and dialect unique to Brown’s unflinching poetic voice.” – Publisher’s Summary
HeartLove: Wedding and Love Poems (ebook) by Haki R. Madhubuti
“HeartLove is love that matters. In these poems, Madhubuti gives us essential meditations on commitment and caring. He offers honest and sometimes cutting criticism that is expected from a true friend or lover. And he gives us poetry—constant reminders of our wholeness and humanity. ‘Some of the finest human poems in English are in this book’ (Robert Bly).” – Publisher’s Summary
Homegirls and Handgrenades (ebook) by Sonia Sanchez
“Winner of the American Book Award.... ‘A lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly’ (Maya Angelou). Originally published in 1984, this collection of prose, prose poems, and lyric verses is as fresh and radical today as it was then. Sonia Sanchez, the premiere poet of the Black Arts Movement, shows the ‘razor blades’ clenched in her teeth in these powerful pieces.” – Publisher’s Summary
Johannesburg & Other Poems (ebook) by Sterling Plumpp
“A poetic and autobiographical fusing of three landscapes: the poet's native Mississippi, Chicago, and South Africa where Sterling Plumpp travelled in 1992. Plumpp paints here stunning and lyrical parallels between Black lives in the US and Black lives in South Africa. Through the prism of the blues Plumpp sees sharecroppers, maids, and the struggle for civil rights on two continents. Like a blues song, Johannesburg is a work where the reader may find a tragic, and often comic, common humanity as composed and sung by a master.” – Publisher’s Summary
Prophets for a New Day (ebook) by Margaret Walker
“A member of the Chicago Black Renaissance, Margaret Walker (1915–1998) was the first woman to receive a national writing prize (1942) and her novel Jubilee (1966) is considered a key landmark work. Issued by a Black publisher, this poetry collection has poems written for or about Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Era and other topics on African-American history.” – Publisher’s Summary
Remembrances of Spring: Collected Early Poems (ebook) by Naomi Cornelia Long Madgett
“Naomi Long Madgett, a 2002 Michigan Women's Hall of Fame Honoree, has been a poet for most of her life and was founder, editor, and publisher of Lotus Press, Inc. She was awarded the 1993 American Book Award and the 1993 Michigan Governor's Artists Award. Remembrances of Spring is intended to commemorate her work and remind us, once again, that she possesses her own, powerful poetic voice. It is also a thought-provoking retrospective examination of the intellect of a woman whose verses touch the deepest parts of our imaginations. This work is a collection of poems previously published in three separate works.” – Publisher’s Summary. Naomi Long Madgett died in 2020.
Timber and Prayer: The Indian Pond Poems (ebook) by Afaa Michael Weaver
“Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.” – Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (ebook) by Cornelius Eady
“A vibrant collection of poems. Victims of the Latest Dance Craze is the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection, a distinguished award for an author's second book of poems.... Worthy alone of the price of the book is the poem 'Jazz Dancer.’ Its obsessive celebration of the jazzman's ‘war against/the obvious’ results in a praiseful litany as the poet enunciates a lovely catalogue of theories about air, motion, kisses, ‘long glances from across a ballroom’ and ‘certain kinds of thirst.’ The poem's leaping connections harmoniously join an odd geography of emotional and physical material into a most beautiful composition. Throughout this volume each reader will discover special favorites from among the 29 individual poems. Eady locates the dance in a marvelous array of possibilities... Throughout, the language is accessible and direct, clean in spirit and statement, delightfully innocent and honest. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers to the pop of fingers or the beat's bop...” – Publisher’s Summary