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This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as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 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has
been wide-reaching.
The work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation’s proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these
poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka’s claim in “Home” that he
becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea
of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of “home” is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of
literature.
