"After Mecca" Book

"Different from the subtle tactics of revision employed by New Negro Renaissance women poets, women poets of the Black Arts Movement deployed multiple voices of recovery, reclamation, and revision and threw off the sex and gender constraints of their foresisters. Black Arts women's poetry represented their concerns as race people to the yet-to-be-converted, imagined community of black people as well as that imagined community already within the circle" (164).

Clarke, scholar and former contributor of the magazine of _Conditions_, focuses on poetry by black women during a prolific and revolutionary ten year period (1968 - 1978). Beginning with Gwendolyn Brooks' _In the Mecca_ and ending with Audre Lorde's _The Black Unicorn_, this critical work sheds light on how the poetry composed by black women during the Black Arts Movement brought in new voices and perspectives, fighting against racism, sexism and homophobia. I appreciated Clarke's readings of Ntozake Shange's _for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf_ and Nikki Giovanni's poetry during the era. Her tying of popular singers (like Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin) with poets was also interesting, though I found these readings less compelling than her other interpretations.