S O S: Poems 1961-2013 [Paperback]

One of theNew York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books

WITH AN APPENDIX OF NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED WORK

Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to unpublished pieces composed during his final years.

Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer in several genres (also published under the name LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. His legacy in world literature is matched by his widespread influence as an activist and cultural leader. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by the Black Arts Movement's intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.

Praise forS O S: Poems 1961-2013

ANew York TimesEditors' Choice

The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work. —Claudia Rankine,New York Times Book Review

S O Sprovides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka’s own evolution as a poet-activist. . . . Baraka is as adept with spare, imagistic lines as with lyrical realism. Racist, provincial ideas earn his angry unmasking as he sings, shouts and shakes a fist at corruption and ignorance. —Washington Post

A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka's poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure. —William J. Harris,Boston Reviel33