Status Updates From S O S: Poems 1961-2013

The book is great. Eye opening. Powerful. I’m not reading it linearly. Every now and then I flip open to a page a read a couple of poems.

finding it nigh impossible to move forward through this book because i keep opening it and just rereading the excellent poems i read last time … and then i finally kick out and start making a little progress and run into a piece of genius like “Joseph To His Brothers” and get stuck on that forever … i know mr baraka would hate me for this. i have literally 530 pages left

feels almost disingenuous to do a post for just the first bit of the collection, knowing the massive scope of barakas writing and how it changed over more than 50 years of work/activism, but i still believe each segment of his career deserves its own special attention, so: ive finished the introduction and the Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note section and im completely awestruck. everything poetry shld be +more