Somewhere Deep Down When

by Darrell Stover

This is a long overdue collective mix of jazz, blues, and funk poetry, sociopolitical poetics, and praise poems influenced by history, science, and the cultural expressiveness of the African Diaspora from a noted spoken word warrior and cultural historian.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 2012

Reviews

[Brooke]

First review on GR! Augh, why am I the first review?? Writing this review is the most intimidating and difficult thing I've ever done. I've never written a first review of anything before. I'm the type of person who always depends on reading reviews first before trying something out, except when it comes to books. I wish the first review could have been an own-voices review instead of, well, me, but hopefully I do this some justice. Now that it's time to write the review, I'm quite worried about how what I say might impact how others view this collection or impact their decision to pick it up. That being said; Do it. Pick it up. It's incredible and I have no idea why it's this underrated. Before picking this up I hadn't heard of Darrell Stover, and even now I tried to do some research without much luck. So, I'll be honest, I don't know much about him. But I can say that despite not knowing, I can tell how much history this collection holds, and how special it is. I can feel the stories, even if I don't fully possess all the emotions and firsthand experience going behind them, nor know the entire context. I really do feel a lot of the Black experience here, I feel both the pain and the pride of the culture, the weight of oppression and how hard people are fighting back. These words are wonderful and easy to get into. I highly recommend.