"Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race...

"An accomplished painter as well as a singularly gifted poet, Clarence Major has said that he writes what he cannot paint. With a painter's eye and an ear for the nuances of daily speech, his new poems explore subtle exchanges, juxtaposing one shifting perspective with another. Major's poems look deeply into the very process of making art, into the imagination and the heart of its creation, and in Waiting for Sweet Betty they reveal a celebrated poet...

The celebrated author shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, relating the events that prompted her mother to send young Angela to Arkansas to live with her grandmother and the complicated fallout that shaped their family life.