"Take Five" brings together all of Kenneth McClane's poetry published since 1971, and reissues, for the first time, the privately-printed "Running Before the Wind," his first collection of verse. Considered by many to be the finest Afro-American poet of his generation, McClane's works have been published in many of the nation's leading magazines. In his introduction to this volume, McClane candidly reveals some of his thoughts on what it means to be a poet, and what he feels about his own work in particular.

In 1991, acclaimed poet Kenneth A. McClane published "Walls: Essays, 1985-1990," a volume of essays dealing with life in Harlem, the death of his alcoholic brother, and the complexities of being black and middle-class in America. Now, in "Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History," McClane contributes further to his self-described autobiographical sojourn with a second collection of interconnected essays. In McClane s words, All concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw. A timely installment in our national narrative, "Color" is a chronicle of the black...

"Walls: Essays, 1985-1990," Kenneth McClane's first book of autobiographical essays (originally published in 1991), is closely related to his second collection, "Color," published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. "Walls"" "is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. It begins with an essay on the death of McClane's brother, Paul, which "changed everything. Time, my work, everything found a new calculus."

His brother's life and death are present in some way in all the essays that follow "A Death in the Family," as McClane tells us about giving a poetry...