This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets

Poet Alexander’s (Why Fathers Cry at Night) anthology gathers an astonishing abundance of voices, introducing new poets and also offering a rich gathering of celebrated and familiar voices, beginning with Nikki Giovanni’s exhilarating and deliciously wild revelry about travelling to Mars. Readers will also find poems by Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Nikki Grimes, Ross Gay, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jason Reynolds, and Natasha Tretheway, among others. The poems are organized thematically (joy, love, origin, race, resistance, praise) and make for rich browsing. Alexander’s introduction to the volume makes it clear he doesn’t want to pigeonhole Black writers but instead to celebrate the scope and individuality of their work. He refers to this book as an “unbridled selfie,” and here that term seems not self-indulgent or ridiculous but necessary and even thrilling.