Rhyme Scheme

Poetry. Book + CD. African American Studies. Rhyme Scheme calls out to Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie John and Amiri Baraka’s Blues People as it responds to patterns of representation by entering deeper to dismantle and rebuild on its own terms black life, black love, black sound.

What accumulates in the sonic chains of these poems is the life and language a community lives and loves. In “Southern Son of Man” Morris writes, “I think of you and I think home… The bad in me gone, heart-made haven, you.” These pulsing trickster lyrics moving backwards and forwards in time at all times are for us and everyone.

—Claudia Rankine