Parul Sehgal Reviews African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Edited by Kevin Young

At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal contributes a glowing review of African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (Penguin Random House, 2020), the new Library of America series volume edited by Kevin Young, published on October 20. Young's many endeavors, writes Sehgal, "are linked by the effort to rescue from oblivion, to supply context, to indicate points of continuity while insisting on the multiplicity of experience." More:

One of Young’s achievements with this new book, six years in the making, is in surfacing lesser-known writers — specifically women writers, like Anne Spencer and Mae V. Cowdery, forgotten figures of the Harlem Renaissance — and interrogating why their work went missing. Did they never publish a book? Did they live in a time, like the 1980s, with scant institutional support for Black poets? Did they write in trivialized forms? Were they forced to keep their writing secret?

Anthologies can be a stay against obscurity. Here are poems considered too taboo for their time (Angelina Weld Grimké’s ravishing love poems, written for another woman) or produced in forms considered marginal (Lucille Clifton’s jump rope rhymes, published here for the first time).

From the first pages, this collection compelled me to read it in an unnatural, oddly bovine way — straight through. (Everyone knows the correct way is in totally haphazard fashion, beginning with one’s favorites — or one’s enemies — nibbling here and there as you go.) But these poems, however conventionally ordered — divided into chronological sections, organized alphabetically by author, for the most part — slyly annotate one another.

Continue reading at the New York Times.