This first collection by a young black poet takes both technical and emotional risks, making for exciting and pleasurable reading. Most of the poems are built with loose and swinging lines, roomy and graceful. If Knight, Harper, and Baraka are the hard poets of bebop, then Finney is a poet of a cooler jazz: laid back yet hot, melodic yet tense, searching. Her subject is family, natural and extended: ``each time i sign my name/ know that it is for a thousand like you/ who could not hold a pen/ but who instead held me . . . .'' Finney is seeking her place, but she has found her power in a strong voice and her claim to its authority.

On wings made of gauze

Literature & Fiction

Nikky Finney

Poetry

W. Morrow

The South: to render all that it means to an African American takes someone with acutely tuned senses, someone with a patience, a passion even, for the region's history and contradictions. It takes a poet. In this new anthology, the first of its kind, more than one hundred contemporary black poets laugh at and cry about, pray for and curse, flee and return to―the South.
Voices new to the scene appear in The Ringing Ear alongside some of the leading names in American literature today, including Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Giovanni, Kevin Young, Cornelius Eady, and Al Young. The southern worlds opened up by these poets are echoed in how their poems are grouped, under headings like "Music, Food, and Work: Heeding the Lamentation and Roar of Things Made by Hand," or "Religion and Nature: The Lord Looks Out for Babies and Fools," or "Love, Flesh, and Family: The Hush and Holler Portraits."
"Not all of us on these pages have come to or from the South by the same dirt road," says anthology editor Nikky Finney. "We have not chosen our dark olive words from the same patch of earth. Some have come by way of birth and others have followed street musicians and urban corner preachers, dream and myth, to stand before its pine and iron gates."

The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South

Univ of Georgia Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nikky Finney. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nikky Finney

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nikky Finney. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

On wings made of gauze

The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South