S O S: Poems, 1961-2013 provides a comprehensive compendium of the best of Amiri Baraka's 50 years of poetry. Selected by Los Angeles poet, broadcaster and anthologist Paul Vangelisti, these poems cover the modern African-American struggle for freedom and identity--but always in the lively, street-savvy, music-centric, angry voice with which Baraka shouted on the doorsteps of academic critics, Harlem organizers and Upper West Side intellectuals.
Forerunners of rap and hip-hop, his poems toast the earthy heart of the black man's experience. In these concluding lines to "Monk's World" from his 1995 collection Funk Lore, Baraka sings of the power and beauty of black culture:
"Oh, man! Monk was digging Trane now
w/o a chaser he drank himself
in. & Trane reported from
the 6th or 7th planet deep in
the Theloniuscape.
Where fire engines screamed the blues
& night had a shiny mouth
& scatted flying things."
Even in his mellowing old age, Baraka could brandish his political voice, as in the recent poem "Mississippi Goddamn!" (referencing Nina Simone's 1964 song) to challenge black support of Hillary Clinton:
"I saw Hillary Clinton in Mississippi with two giant coons
One on each side, like Mandrake the Magician
With her own two Lothars...
Is this the meaning of integration or the effects of segregation?"
S O S is the perfect place to hear the voice that influenced, if not defined, decades of black political struggle when few were listening--and even fewer were doing anything. Baraka did something. Man, he did plenty. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.