Black + Blues

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich, arid, beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts — “Fragments,” “Drought,” and “Flowers.” In Brathwaite’s voice, as The Beloit Poetry Journal noted, “the false distinctions between poetry and polemic, between tragic vision and comic insight, between anger and tenderness, here disappear. At last a major poet of our troubled history and troubling time is available to readers in this country.” “His dazzling, inventive language, his tragic yet unquenchable vision,” as Adrienne Rich declared, “make Kamau Brathwaite one of the most compelling of late 20th century poets.”