Spirit and Flame

Book excerpt: An outline to the African American poetic conversation of the 1990s, Spirit and Flame is the first intergenerational volume of African American poetry with an expressly contemporary focus since the numerous and influential black poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of numerous forms (jazz stylings to haiku) and topics (middle passage to 0. J.), this present gathering of fifty-three significant poets, among them Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, and Patricia Smith, illustrates both the vibrancy of the African American experience and the talented and current poetic response that is part and parcel of it.