A HARD SUMMATION is a suite of 13 new poems by Afaa Michael Weaver, covering the history of African Americans from the Middle Passage to Now. Like a rite of passage, struggle has been unyielding and synonymous with the black experience in America. In this rich compilation, Weaver unearths a genealogical deficit that permeates through generations. But in this collection, you won't hear the poems cry foul or attempt to appease friend or offend foe. Its intention is hardly to be conclusive. When you add it all up, A HARD SUMMATION offers us an opportunity to listen, celebrate, commemorate, and...

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and...