Description: Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future
Review Quotes:
"[One of] the most focused and comprehensive critical accounts to date of the poetry genealogies, theoretical frameworks, and tour-de-force collections that have given rise to this new era in African American historical poetry . . . [Debo does] not purport to solve the dilemma of archival elision or erasure, but insist[s] on the importance of counter-archives and counter-stories in an era when the residue of past injustices is everywhere in plain sight." --American Literary History
"As a sharp-eyed and hospitable introduction to the most ambitious poems of Elizabeth Alexander, Camille Dungy, Kevin Young, and company, this book has few equals. And its central focus--the fine art and raw politics of retelling Black history in the twenty-first century--could not be more relevant." --William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis