New and Collected Poems

Poems deal with urban life, gangsters, dreams, religion, the Black experience, music, myth, politics, and history

Reed is the baad man of contemporary black poetry, magician/musician of the printed page, turning his insights and cleansing rage into a hipster's be-bop vision of life in so-called white-run America. The self-invented "Neo-HooDooism" of his early poems blends Haitian voodoo, Egyptian death rites, street slang and African lore into a heady brew that subverts the dominant culture's racist, Eurocentric attitudes. The later poems are mellower, but Reed's basic stance remains unchanged. In "The Middle Class Blues," a mordant ballad aimed at the black bourgeoisie as much as at whites, he mocks a world delimited by freeways and trips to the dentist. Persons who accuse novelist-essayist Reed ( Flight to Canada , etc.) of antifeminism will find some surprises ("When men invented the term / Bitch / They were talking about themselves"). His jazz-syncopated verses plunge us into a maelstrom of slumlords, reactionary poets, "good Germans," sellouts, skydivers, posers, lovers and rebels.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reed's poems are conjured from a potent mix of black speech and music, mythology, voodoo, and pop culture. Ribald, hyperbolic, and highly satiric, they have continually lambasted the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage and sought spiritual and intellectual liberation in the black counter-tradition he calls 'neo-hoodoo." Reed is his most vitriolic in Conjure (1970), where he presents himself as a neo-hoodoo Jesse James out to subvert the dominant culture. Succeeding collections are less overtly ideological and alternate anger with an increased tolerance and recognition of ambiguity. His more polemical works have not always worn well, but as this work attests, Reed remains one of the most provocative and important voices in contemporary American poetry. Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.