Middle Passages

Author: Kamu Brathwaite

Editors: Jen Bervin and Marta Werner

Publisher: New Directions (2013)

Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry offers stunning collages devoted to the history, mythology, and language of the African diaspora, and has gained him a world reputation. Middle Passages is his sixteenth poetry volume, but his first with an American publisher. With notes of protest and lament, the fourteen poems of Middle Passages address the effects of the Middle Passage of slavery on the New World, and celebrate great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith), poets, heroes of the resistance, and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Nelson Mandela. And as the London Times Literary Supplement noted, it is “a poetry that moves between rage and tenderness, doubt and displacement to affirmation… Middle Passages is a potent and effective book, a work of passion and integrity.”