Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and black women writers of the period, whose poems chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: 'After Mecca'
1(6)
1 'Missed Love': Black Power and Black Poetry
7(15)
2 The Loss of Lyric Space in Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"
22(25)
3 Queen Sistuh: Black Women Poets and the Circle(s) of Blackness
47(47)
4 Black Feminist Communalism: Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
94(27)
5 Transferences and Confluences: Black Arts and Black Lesbian-Feminism in Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn
121(50)
Notes
171(16)
Works Cited
187(6)
Index
193(12)
Permissions
205
