Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions--those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender...

From the Publisher: This gorgeous new collection gathers into one concise volume the finest work by Queen Victoria's favorite poet. Whether steeped in sensuous melancholy, as in "Maud," or chivalric, heroic, and allegorical, as in "Morte D'Arthur," Tennyson's poetry epitomizes the Victorian age for which he became a spokesperson when named Poet Laureate of England in 1850.

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. 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 voice their passionate...

This anthology of contemporary American poetry focuses on the new poem, the hybrid, a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles. As one of the editors argues in the introduction to this anthology, the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. The focus of this work is on the...