Ohio Railroads is a long poem--in essay form--with origins in the author's memory of a dream in which one of his parents died and the other, in response, sent forward a warning in what may have been the persona of the departed one. Ohio Railroads explores the peculiar weight of the dream and accounts for some of the measurement of the accessible world. The place of exploration is the several neighborhoods that comprise black Dayton (neighborhoods cut into big triangles by the train lines) and also "big Ohio" itself (with its mythologies of settlement and retreat and migration, its heroes, and...

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.

The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel...