Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

Chicago poet Coval, an HBO Def Poet, grapples with questions of identity and compassion. He writes of latchkeys marooned in front the television at home and menaced by violence at school. Assessing his own Jewish heritage in Pieces of Shalom, he wants to turn my mind on the divine/without historical frustration. Vehemently condemning hypocrisy, Coval echoes Allen Ginsberg in his spiritual revolt, cosmic vision, and longing for multicultural transcendence. In boldly beautiful and outspoken hip-hop manifestos, he forges links among all Diaspora people, citing Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce, picturing Jack Robinson breaking the color line on the first night of Passover in 1947, and recognizing that davening worshippers in a synagogue are experiencing the same energy and ecstasy he experiences when enthralled by hip-hop. Potent metaphors, muscular turns of phrase, a keen political conscience, and a Studs Terkelesque openness to humankind's countless stories fuel Coval's percussive calls for compassion and connection. Accompanied by a CD and graced with cover art by the incomparable Tony Fitzpatrick, this is one potent and positive debut. --Donna Seaman, Copyright 2006 Booklist.

Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago's Wicker Park in the late 1990's, Coval's home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston's illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

Coval's affinity for Chicago s crazy-quilt of ethnicities and races, the dreams of immigrants and seekers, infuse his poems with lamentation and exaltation as he celebrates uniqueness and commonality. Funny, sexy, and empathic, he riffs on the knot of family and the revelations kicked up by chance encounters, meditates on America's sorrows and beauty as he rides cross-country trains and a subway that rises from the shadows to the light on elevating tracks. Curious about everyone's story, Coval is an enemy of complacence and a believer in cross-pollination, and like the corner store he describes, his well-stocked poems contain beef jerky and sandalwood incense, that is, earth and spirit, body and soul. Donna Seaman --American Library Association Booklist (from amazon.com).