Now on a Bookshelf Near You: Amiri Baraka's S O S: Poems 1961-2013

Thank goodness Grove Press recently published this spectacular Amiri Baraka tome. The New York Times's Dwight Garner provides a little illumination to the text. From NYT:

There are two ways to rank writers, the poet John Berryman said, “in terms of gift and in terms of achievement.”

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) had a bold gift. His best poems are cynical, impolite, acid in their wit’s rain. He tapped easily into the suspicion and resentment that linger below the promise of American life. He was the keeper of a certain vinegary portion of the African-American imagination. He declared, over and over, that he would not be fooled again.

You can open to nearly anywhere in the first third of “S O S: Poems 1961-2013,” a career-spanning new collection of his work, and find fresh evidence of his capacities. In a poem called “Three Modes of History and Culture,” from 1969, a kind of updated Muddy Waters blues, he caught the faces of those in “trains/leaning north, catching hellfire in windows, passing through/the first ignoble cities of missouri, to illinois, and the panting/Chicago.”

What’s best about Baraka’s verse is that this historical sensibility and sense of historical dread bump elbows with anarchic comedy. “I have slept with almost every mediocre colored woman/on 23rd St,” he declares in a poem from “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (1961), his first collection of verse. [...]

Keep reading at NYT.