Home/Bass: Poems
by Sterling D. Plumpp

""Home/Bass ""brings to the forefront the myriad of folks that inhabit the up-South streets of Chicago or the unaltered roads of Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and other pockets inhabited by Blacks throughout the South. Sterling Plumpp has lived with these folks—sharecroppers, preachers, misplaced Mississippi blues men and women. He has been in their houses, has dined at their tables, and has drunk at the bars on the corners. He is not a stranger to their articulations—voices that call to him from a Natchez cemetery, from the outskirts of some Mississippi Delta town, or settle on Maxwell Street in Chicago—all through the observant and often omnipresent lens of blues artist Willie Kent. Plumpp is always mindful of the slow, steady rhythms of the blues, not as backdrop, but as the foundation and framework on which he structures the components of this book. With the publication of ""Home/Bass, ""Plumpp has once again captured the very essence of language and the blues from the inside out.