"The much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott Heron, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde"--

From Two Live Crew's controversial comedy to Ice Cube's gangsta styling and the battle rhymes of a streetcorner cypher, rap has always drawn on deep traditions of African American poetic word-play, In Talking 'Bout Your Mama, author Elijah Wald explores one of the most potent sources of rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game known as "the dozens." So what is the dozens? At its simplest, it's a comic chain of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it's an intricate form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Wald traces the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that has ruled urban neighborhoods since the early 1900s. Whether considered vernacular poetry, aggressive dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens is a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Johnson to Tupac Shakur and Jay Z. Wald goes back to the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and in its ultimate evolution into the improvisatory battling of rap. From schoolyard games and rural work songs to urban novels and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap, Wald uses the dozens as a lens to provide new insight into over a century of African American culture. A groundbreaking work, Talking 'Bout Your Mama is an essential book for anyone interested in African American cultural studies, history and linguistics, and the origins of rap music.

Eisen-Martin's syntax lands somewhere between Sphinx and Thelonious...through poem he makes spare, efficient, wild-eyed jazz...rubs mud and accountability into the pores of the zeros and ones in the glass and steel city. Throughout SOMEONE'S DEAD ALREADY, I return to the wonder of the writer's economy of language, how deftly the words infuse their amulet casings with blood temperature at the edge of boiling. This work is as hungry as revolution, a necessary, deadly still in these shifting times...

Lyrical text explores how Blues have been part of everyday life throughout history, from its origins in the sounds of the earth, through slaves' voices singing of freedom, to today's greatest performers--and listeners.

This is hip hop that your teacher will finally admit is poetry. Others have blended jazz and poetry before, but few more deftly than Mansbach. An account of growing up hip hop in NYC told through verse. That's right, verse. Picks up where Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin left off.

FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture. L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial" American culture-where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis" comes along to step in to the void. i am a hero to most. the great hope of something other. a complex back-story. something other than the business of my father. Bland's antonym. jim crow's black sheep. the forgotten son left to rise in the darkness among the dis carded in the wild of working class, single mother hoods. a hero who transcends who translates the dis satisfactions of the plains; kids of kurt cobain, method man amphetamine, the odd Iowan who digs dirt and lights beyond the pig yard, spits nebraskan argot, hero to the heart land, middle brow(n) america "--