Description:
What I Say is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.
Review Quotes: "What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries."
--Journal of Modern Literature
--Journal of Modern Literature "[What I Say] has an extraordinary range of important voices working within a variety of forms and intentions that include hybrid, prose poem, eco-poetics, sound poem, visual poem, investigative poem, polemical poem and presents writers often excluded from previous attention and scholarship. We are in a difficult and generative time of actualizing what a more human America needs to fight, articulate, and stand up for. The poetry in this anthology seems to light a way, a path toward the imperatives we face as we give greater value to social justice, truth, beauty, and the intrinsic power of a conscious language as a means for greater awareness, a panoramic vision of a multi verse of poetries. ... I know I will learn something from this book, and also delight in its beauties."
--Anne Waldman, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of more than forty books of poetry, including Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born and Gossamurmur