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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry | |
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| Just Looking | |
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| Ed Roberson "We Must Be Careful" | |
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| Lucille Clifton "the earth is a living thing" | |
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| Al Young "The Mountains of California: Part I" | |
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| G. E. Patterson "The Mountain Road Ends Here" | |
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| June Jordan "Queen Anne's Lace" | |
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| George Moses Horton "On Summer" | |
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| Nikki Giovanni "The Yellow Jacket" | |
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| Yusef Komunyakaa "Eclogue at Twilight" | |
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| Marilyn Nelson "Ruellia Noctifl ora" | |
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| Rita Dove "Evening Primrose" | |
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| Robert Hayden "The Night-Blooming Cereus" | |
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| George Marion McClellan "A September Night" | |
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| Thylias Moss "Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton" | |
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| Helene Johnson "Metamorphism" | |
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| Toni Wynn "a brown girl's nature poem: provincetown" | |
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| Gerald Barrax Sr. "What More?" | |
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| Ed Roberson "be careful" | |
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| Rachel Eliza Griths "Watching Blackbirds Turn to Ghosts" | |
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| Alvin Aubert "If Winter Comes, Can Spring?" | |
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| Evie Shockley "31 words * prose poems [#12]" | |
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| Nature, Be with Us | |
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| Ravi Howard "We Are Not Strangers Here" | |
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| James A. Emanuel "For a Farmer" | |
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| Gerald Barrax Sr. "To Waste at Trees" | |
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| Carl Phillips "White Dog" | |
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| Evie Shockley "you must walk this lonesome" | |
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| Cyrus Cassells "Down from the Houses of Magic" | |
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| George Marion McClellan "The Ephemera" | |
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| Ruth Ellen Kocher "Sleepwalker on the Mountain" | |
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| Richard Wright #543 | |
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| Mark McMorris "Aphrodite of Economy" | |
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| Marilyn Nelson "Arachis Hypogaea" | |
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| Anthony Walton "In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson" | |
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| Camille T. Dungy "Language" | |
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| June Jordan "For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka)" | |
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| Lucille Clifton "generations" | |
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| Yusef Komunyakaa "Work" | |
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| Ross Gay "Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be" | |
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| Sterling Brown "To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden" | |
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| Ed Roberson "Urban Nature" | |
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| Reginald Shepherd "September Songs" | |
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| Dirt on Our Hands | |
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| Richard Wright from 12 Million Black Voices | |
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| Anne Spencer "Another April" | |
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| Gerald Barrax Sr. "Barriers" | |
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| Lenard D. Moore "A Young Peacock" | |
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| Major Jackson "Urban Renewal: XIII" | |
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| Audre Lorde "The Bees" | |
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| Anthony Walton "Carrion" | |
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| June Jordan "look at the blackbird fall" | |
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| Wanda Coleman "Flight of the California Condor" | |
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| Camille T. Dungy "Since Everyone Can Never Be Safe" | |
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| Patricia Smith "Won't Be But a Minute" | |
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| Michael S. Harper "Called" | |
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| Jean Toomer "Harvest Song" | |
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| Arna Bontemps "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" | |
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| Melvin Dixon "Wood and Rain" | |
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| Claude McKay "Joy in the Woods" | |
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| Margaret Walker "Sorrow Home" | |
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| Honore Fanonne Je≈ers "Blues Aubade (or, Revision of the Lean, Post-Modernist Pastorale)" | |
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| Ed Roberson "romance" | |
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| Alice Dunbar-Nelson "April Is on the Way" | |
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| Pests, People Too | |
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| C. S. Giscombe "Boll Weevils, Coyotes, and the Color of Nuisance" | |
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| Amber Flora Thomas "Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs" | |
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| Gregory Pardlo "Man Reading in Bed by a Window with Bugs" | |
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| Major Jackson "Pest" | |
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| Tim Seibles "Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist" | |
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| Richard Wright #459 | |
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| Thomas Sayers Ellis "The Market" | |
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| Tara Betts "For Those Who Need a True Story" | |
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| Lenard D. Moore "Postcard to an Ecologist" | |
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| C. S. Giscombe "Nature Boy" | |
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| Robert Hayden "A Plague of Starlings" | |
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| Janice N. Harrington "O Believer" | |
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| Audre Lorde "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches" | |
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| Kwame Alexander "Life" | |
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| Kamilah Aisha Moon "What a Snakehead Discovered in a Maryland Pond and a Poet in Corporate America Have in Common" | |
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| Shane Book "The Lost Conquistador" | |
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| Lucille Clifton "the beginning of the end of the world" | |
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| Natasha Trethewey "Carpenter Bee" | |
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| Yusef Komunyakaa "Yellowjackets" | |
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| Forsaken of the Earth | |
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| Alice Walker "The Flowers" | |
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| Phillis Wheatley "On Imagination" | |
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| Nikki Giovanni "For Saundra" | |
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| G. E. Patterson "The Natural World" | |
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| Langston Hughes "Lament for Dark Peoples" | |
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| Anne Spencer "White Things" | |
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| Rita Dove "Parsley" | |
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| Paul Laurence Dunbar "The Haunted Oak" | |
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| Albery Whitman from Rape of Florida, Canto I | |
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| Douglas Kearney "Swimchant of Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)" | |
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| Clarence Major "Water usa" | |
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| Major Jackson "Migration" | |
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| Ruth Ellen Kocher "February Leaving" | |
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| Ed Roberson "blue horses" | |
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| Gwendolyn Brooks "Sick Man Looks at Flowers" | |
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| Arna Bontemps "Prodigal" | |
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| Cynthia Parker-Ohene "potters' field" | |
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| Natasha Trethewey "Monument" | |
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| Disasters, Natural and Other | |
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| Mona Lisa Saloy "Disasters, Nature, and Poetry" | |
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| Askia M. Tour "Floodtide" | |
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| Sterling Brown "Children of the Mississippi" | |
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| James A. Emanuel "Emmett Till" | |
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| devorah major "sign post" | |
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| Audre Lorde "Song" | |
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| G. E. Patterson "The Sacred History of the Earth" | |
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| Yusef Komunyakaa "A Greenness Taller Than Gods" | |
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| Patricia Spears Jones "San Francisco, Spring 1986" | |
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| Carl Phillips "The Cure" | |
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| Natasha Trethewey "Liturgy" | |
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| Jean Toomer "Reapers" | |
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| Ishmael Reed "Earthquake Blues" | |
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| Amber Flora Thomas "Erasure" | |
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| Douglas Kearney "Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin's Spiritual" | |
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| Anne Spencer "Requiem" | |
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| Robert Hayden "Ice Storm" | |
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| Talk of the Animals | |
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| Sean Hill "A Shepherd's Tale" | |
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| Jean Toomer "Beehive" | |
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| Rachel Eliza Griffiths "Black-and-White Dusk at Limantour Beach" | |
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| Paul Laurence Dunbar "Sympathy" | |
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| Melvin B. Tolson "The Sea-Turtle and the Shark" | |
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| Richard Wright #175 | |
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| Harryette Mullen "European Folk Tale Variant" | |
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| Wendy S. Walters "Man Raised as Chicken" | |
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| C. S. Giscombe "Far" | |
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| Shara McCallum "The Spider Speaks" | |
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| Cyrus Cassells "The Hummingbird" | |
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| Tim Seibles "The Herd" | |
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| Cornelius Eady "Speed" | |
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| Ishmael Reed "Points of View" | |
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| Wanda Coleman "Requiem for a Nest" | |
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| Clarence Major "Surfaces and Masks: XXX" | |
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| Toi Derricotte "The Minks" | |
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| Janice N. Harrington "Possum" | |
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| Afaa Michael Weaver "The Appaloosa" | |
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| G. E. Patterson "April Lyric / All I Know Is" | |
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| What the Land Remembers | |
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| Honore Fanonne Je≈ers "April in Eatonton" | |
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| Robert Hayden "Locus" | |
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| Myronn Hardy "Jaguaripe" | |
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| Janice N. Harrington "What There Was" | |
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| Frank X Walker "Wind Talker" | |
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| Lucille Clifton "mulberry fi elds" | |
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| E. Ethelbert Miller "I Am Black and the Trees Are Green" | |
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| Amaud Jamaul Johnson "The Maple Remains" | |
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| Douglas Kearney "Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby" | |
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| June Jordan "Out in the Country of My Country" | |
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| Rita Dove "Three Days of Forest, a River, Free" | |
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| Claudia Rankine "American Light" | |
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| C. S. Giscombe "Look Ahead, Look South: the future" | |
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| Margaret Walker "Southern Song" | |
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| Ed Roberson "Wave" | |
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| Evie Shockley "her table mountain" | |
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| Sherley Anne Williams from "Juneteenth: The Bicentennial Poem" | |
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| Indigo Moor "Tap-Root" | |
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| Marilyn Nelson "Last Talk with Jim Hardwick" | |
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| Michael S. Harper "History as Apple Tree" | |
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| Growing Out of This Land | |
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| Camille T. Dungy "Writing Home" | |
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| Richard Wright #559 | |
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| Yusef Komunyakaa "The Millpond" | |
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| Sean Hill "Seven Pastorals at Sixteen" | |
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| Janice N. Harrington "Before a Screen Door" | |
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| Indigo Moor "Pull" | |
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| C. S. Giscombe "Two Directions" | |
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| Marilyn Nelson "My Grandfather Walks in the Woods" | |
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| Stephanie Pruitt "Mississippi Gardens" | |
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| Gerald Barrax Sr. "I Called Them Trees" | |
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| Wanda Coleman "Beaches. Why I Don't Care for Them" | |
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| Ruth Ellen Kocher "At 57, My Father Learns to Grow Things" | |
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| Gregory Pardlo "Suburban Noir" | |
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| June Jordan "Letter to the Local Police" | |
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| Frank X Walker "Homeopathic" | |
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| Terrance Hayes "Root" | |
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| Audre Lorde "What My Child Learns of the Sea" | |
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| Remica L. Bingham "The Ritual of Season" | |
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| Mark McMorris "More Than Once in Caves" | |
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| Al Young "Pachuta, Mississippi / A Memoir" | |
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| Comes Always Spring | |
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| Marilyn Nelson "First Skunk of Spring" | |
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| Anne Spencer "[Earth, I Thank You]" | |
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| Sean Hill "Bemidji in Spring" | |
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| Nikki Giovanni "Winter Poem" | |
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| Claude McKay "After the Winter" | |
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| Joanne V. Gabbin "For Alexis" | |
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| Ross Gay "Thank You" | |
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| George Marion McClellan "Spring Dawn" | |
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| James Weldon Johnson "Deep in the Quiet Wood" | |
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| Alice Dunbar-Nelson "Violets" | |
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| Claudia Rankine "The Man. His Bowl. His Raspberries." | |
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| Camille T. Dungy "What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison" | |
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| Langston Hughes "Earth Song" | |
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| Jessie Redmon Fauset "Rondeau" | |
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| Kendra Hamilton "Southern Living" | |
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| Elizabeth Alexander "Geraniums" | |
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| Margaret Walker "My Mississippi Spring" | |
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| Tim Seibles "Fearless" | |
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| Credits | |
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| List of Contributors | |
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| Index of Authors | |
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| Index of Titles | |