Deep in the center of every tree, you'll find the heartwood. This wood is the very soul of a tree. The characters in this book by poet Nikky Finney are the heartwood of their small Kentucky communities. You'll meet Buck Jones and Mae Bennet, whose anger has twisted them up inside, Queenie Sims and Arizona Scott, who can see the good in people, and Trina Sims and Jenny Bryan, two young women who discover how much they are alike despite their different skin color. Set in rural Kentucky, this story is filled with the sights and sounds, hopes and hurts of a land and its people. Breathing with life and vitality, Heartwood moves its readers to speak out and remind the world of the goodness it so easily forgets. The characters of Heartwood lead the way for us in this beautiful story.

Winner of 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee for 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection "Head Off & Split "sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.

Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

All of the published poetry of James Baldwin, including six significant poems previously only available in a limited edition
During his lifetime (1924-1987), James Baldwin authored seven novels, as well as several plays and essay collections, which were published to wide-spread praise. These books, among them "Notes of a Native Son," " The Fire Next Time," "Giovanni's Room," and "Go Tell It on the Mountain," ""brought him well-deserved acclaim as a public intellectual and admiration as a writer. However, Baldwin's earliest writing was in poetic form, and Baldwin considered himself a poet throughout his lifetime. Nonetheless, his single book of poetry, "Jimmy's Blues," never achieved the popularity of his novels and nonfiction, and is the one and only book to fall out of print.
This new collection presents James Baldwin the poet, including all nineteen poems from "Jimmy's Blues," as well as all the poems from a limited-edition volume called "Gypsy," of which only 325 copies were ever printed and which was in production at the time of his death. Known for his relentless honesty and startlingly prophetic insights on issues of race, gender, class, and poverty, Baldwin is just as enlightening and bold in his poetry as in his famous novels and essays. The poems range from the extended dramatic narratives of "Staggerlee wonders" and "Gypsy" to the lyrical beauty of "Some days," which has been set to music and interpreted by such acclaimed artists as Audra McDonald. Nikky Finney's introductory essay reveals the importance, relevance, and rich rewards of these little-known works. Baldwin's many devotees will find much to celebrate in these pages.

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts - copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of 'docu-poetry.' The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the 'insurgent sensualist,' hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ." The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page. "One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing." Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

From the foreword: "In Perfect Black, Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills& mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two." Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.

Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings and, in 1993, she received an American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. This Is My Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career. Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey (1975).