We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters

“Brian Gilmore’s We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters weds the wily clarity of Lucille Clifton to the cultural acuity of James Baldwin. "Res ipsa loquitur" ("The thing speaks for itself"), Gilmore says in one poem, recasting William Carlos Williams’ dictum: "no ideas but in things," as a statement of self-determination and witness. Stereotypes, and clichés about African-American life are obliterated by poems that are vibrant, distinct and unequivocally American. Political, personal, exceptional—this is a remarkable book about what it means to be us.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller, award-winning poet and Director of Howard University’s African-American Resource Center

“In We Didn’t know Any Gangsters, Brian Gilmore creates a work of architecture, populating it with people we’ll never forget. Novelists and playwrights do this all the time, but when a poet creates a big stage with fascinating characters, that is technique and that is triumph. Meet a young man growing up, meet his family, see a society sometimes unsafe—and experience real life, expertly drawn, with pulsating, fast-moving, innovative, lyricism. The motor inside his poetry hums with prophecy and politics, but there is even more—there is a beautiful heart at the center of his writing, and poems are messages torn from it, sorted out, and, put all together to make up our human history. Brian Gilmore proves he was obviously born to write, and it’s our good fortune.”
—Terrance Hayes, MacArthur Fellow, 2010 National Book Award Winner