Listen Up! - Review - book reviews

American Visions, Oct, 1999 by Denolyn Carroll

Listen Up! edited by Zoe Anglesey (One World & Ballantine Publishing Group. 1999. $12.50, paper)--This urban anthology brings together nine of the nation's top spoken-word artists: Tish Benson, Ava Chin, Suheir Hammad, Jessica Care Moore, Tracie Morris, Willie Perdomo, Carl Hancock Rux, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie and Saul Stacey Williams. In structure, language, themes and images, Listen Up! vibrates with the individual and collective energy of these award-winning performance poets, who represent some of the brightest and best to emerge from the poetry renaissance that began in the early 1990s. The foreword, by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa; the introduction, by the editor; the afterword, by Edouard Glissant; and the introductory biography of each artist bring into focus the scope of the spoken-word-performance-poetry territory. With themes that include social injustice and self-realization, words that are charged with pop-cultural and ancestral and traditional literary references, and images that are sometimes subtle, sometimes stark--all buoyed by hip-hop and blues rhythms--the works in this collection make the printed word as live as it can be.

Denolyn Carroll is a freelance writer and editor in New York City. She also lectures on writing and editing at Pace University. Her last article for American Visions, "Premium Fare," appeared in the August/September 1999 issue.