Books like Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Rupi Kaur’s second poetry collection, *The Sun and Her Flowers*, explores themes of growth, healing, and self‑discovery through raw, personal verses about love, loss, and renewal.

In Harlem, Xiomara Batista learns to use her voice and verse to fight for herself and her dreams, turning lyrical poetry into her most powerful tool.

A powerful collection of poems by Audre Lorde that explores African American lesbian identity, social justice, and personal resilience.

A newly assembled anthology of James Baldwin’s poetry, featuring all nineteen poems from the original *Jimmy’s Blues* plus those from the limited‑edition *Gypsy* edition.

A poetic novella that blends classical myth with modern themes, following the longing and self‑discovery of the winged figure Geryon as he navigates love, identity, and the world of photography.

A compelling collection of poems that confronts gun violence, police brutality, and faith through the lens of a young African American man in the Midwest.

Poets for Life is a compilation of poems that confront AIDS and its effects on society, politics, and personal relationships.

‘The Weary Blues’ by Langston Hughes is a landmark collection of early 20th‑century African‑American poems that blends jazz rhythms, soulful lyricism, and personal reflection on race and identity.

"In November 1781, thee captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert - the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves - Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten." --Book Jacket.

Dale Peck blends memoir, essay, and reportage to chart the 1987‑1996 era of the AIDS crisis, exploring ACT UP, serial killings of gay men, and the shifting fortunes of LGBTQ activism.

"Poet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer. From "Poem about Police Violence": Tell me something what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?. I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid and repetitive affront as when they tell me 18 cops in order to subdue one man 18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn street was just a "justifiable accident" again (again) People been having accidents all over the globe so long like that I reckon that the only suitable insurance is a gun"--