This career-spanning volume by Thylias Moss, one of America’s most revered literary innovators, conveys the dazzling spectrum of her hypnotic poetic output, written over the past thirty-five years and including selections from each previous book as well as previously unpublished new poems.A poet whose innovations have influenced generations of writers, Thylias Moss is a sort of taxonomist-preacher, whose profound meditation on American culture underlies and propels...

Vashti, a sexually repressed 60-year-old female poet finally finds the courage to divorce a man she married as a teenager, a man jealous of her looks, of the very equipment that makes her so appealing and this freedom allows 66-year-old poet Thomas Higginson to act upon the fantasy he's had for thirty years of loving Vashti, actually holding her, making love to her, a fantasy he acts out by visiting a store of Vashti, his fantasy come to life, and of course, entering that store is really a...

Malin Pereira’s collection of eight interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post–Black Arts Movement generation.This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 198...