Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac's sense of mission as a writer. This landmark edition brings together for the first time all Kerouac's major poetic works--Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Poems All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Book of Haikus--along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time. He wrote poetry in every period of his life, in forms as diverse as...

"Library of America presents the fullest selection ever of visionary American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman: two novels, forty-four brilliant short stories, nearly two-hundred poems, and both the published and manuscript versions of the landmark story "The yellow wall-paper." The short fiction presented here showcases Gilman's mastery of ghost stories, allegorical fantasy, and social realism and includes a virtuoso series of stories written in imitation...