I absolutely LOVED this anthology. If i could choose one book to summarize everything I've learned and experienced growing up as a black woman in America, it would be this book. I highly recommend it to any one who is interested in poetry or black art.

Before I started the book, I read a few reviews bemoaning the racial undertones of the poetry, but I took those reviews with a grain of salt for a number of reasons:
1) A good portion of recent black history involves race politics.
2) The book was originally published in 1971, just after the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
3) The book is called the BLACK poets.

I don't know what those other readers were expecting.
That said, the poems in this book are about so much more than race. They covers topics such as religion, family, identity, music, and even poetry itself. Dudley Randall did a fantastic job compiling a wide range poetic styles and choosing poets of diverse backgrounds. I also appreciated his inclusion of folk poetry, which is so often overlooked in poetry anthologies. I usually donate books when I'm done with them because my shelf has limited space, but The Black Poets is definitely a keeper.