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       "Harper's is a poetry of classically unadorned statement, a direct,
        unflinching record of a man alive in his time. When he is at his best,
        in both his public and his private voice, he creates a language humming
        with emotion and ennobled by a deeply felt human dignity."
        -- Virginia Quarterly Review
      ". . . one of the finest poets of our time."
        -- San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
     
Stephen Henderson Award, African American Literature and Culture Society (AALCS), 2013. Author is recipient of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, Poetry Society of America, 2008.

"Harper's poetry is not limited by color or attitude. In Images of Kin, Harper amazes with his keen sense of political and personal histories, his breadth of expression. This collection fixes Harper as one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation" -- Chicago Sun-Times
"It is Mr. Harper's achievement to have projected his most difficult and complex insights and feelings through the epical manner, yet at the same time carried us along to identify with him." -- New York Times Book Review

Songlines in Michaeltree is the long-awaited collected poems--with the sparkling addition of some new ones--of one of America's most revered poets.
 
Hailed by critics as a distinctive and powerful presence in contemporary American poetry, Michael S. Harper is an artist and a truth teller who tempers his astonishing technical virtuosity with a compassionate and healing vision. A keen observer and a potent commentator, Harper calls a complacent society vigorously to account while cradling the wounded and remembering the lost.
Calling Harper "one of the finest poets of our time . . . [and] one of the most human and humane,"
 
George Cuomo of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle observed, "Harper's poetry has drawn its vitality from the incredible energy of his language and the honesty of his perceptions." Songlines in Michaeltree  is a magnificent celebration of Harper's continuing, unstinting gifts.
 

Arguably the greatest African American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown's poems, and the only edition available in the United States.

Sterling A. Brown was renowned for his trenchant poetry and scholarship on African American folklife. A contemporary of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, Brown became the first poet laureate of the District of Columbia. His celebrated works, including Southern Road, address issues of race through collages of narrative and dialect unique to Brown’s unflinching poetic voice.

Edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper, this classic collection includes a new foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady and the original introduction by Michael S. Harper, as well as introductions to Southern Road by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. The result is a tour de force by one of the most distinctive poets in American letters.

For decades, Michael S. Harper has written poetry that speaks with many voices. His work teems with poetry configured as awe, poetry as courtship, and poetry as elegy and homage. Infused with tales and riddles, sass and satire and surprise, Harper’s poetry takes the form of psalms, jazz experiments, soft serenades, and radical provocations. In Use Trouble, his first major collection since Songlines in Michaeltree, Harper renews poetry as the art of taking nothing for granted. In three groups--"The Fret Cycle," "Use Trouble," and "I Do Believe in People"--he draws on his seemingly inexhaustible resources to paint, sing, sympathize, and sorrow. Here are his tributes to his father and family, his irrepressible playfulness, and his lifelong romance between poetry and music.