Black Lives Matter Book Display Featured Text(s)

Celebrate National Poetry Month

The UCI Libraries’ Black Lives Matter book display features a variety of works of poetry. We already featured a review of Kevin Young’s The Grey Album . And we even reviewed Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

For this post, we celebrate April as the National Poetry Month by calling attention to a few other works of poetry that you can find on display in Langson Library.

Wild Hundreds by Nate Marshall


Wild Hundreds

Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.

 

Follow Nate Marshall @illuminatemics

Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire


Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth

As Rumi said, “Love will find its way through all languages on its own”; in ‘teaching my mother how to give birth’, Warsan’s début pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly.

Follow Warsan Shire @warsan_shire

Black Movie by Danez Smith

Black Movie

Poetry. African American Studies. These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make “a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children/ smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.” That’s no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith’s way saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats.

Follow Danez Smith @Danez_Smif

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
by Lucille Clifton

Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton’s lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet’s career.