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New and Selected Poems 
by Everett Hoagland

With an Introduction by Martín Espada

Leapfrog Press
107 Pages - 6" X 9" - Paper

ISBN 0-9679520-5-0 Trade edition

Your WebDirect price $14.95
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Thirty years of the best published poems by one of our finest African-American Poets

Everett Hoagland is a poet of witness. Well Known  by the African-American community for blending language with musical form through sound, image, and rhythm, his poetry is a passionate examination of history, which allows us to neither look away nor forget.

First published by the historic Broadside Press, Hoagland now offers us thirty years of his best published poems plus a collection of stunning new work.

The temperature of these poems is high, sometimes radiantly warm and loving, sometimes scalding with a sense of justice and injustice. But Hoagland's range is wide. He digs for the poetry in his subjects, never resting in rhetoric but passing through it into something finer and deeper.  He writes about Africa; about friendship and fatherhood; about New England, his adopted home; about historical figures who live in his mind and his blood. From Sally Hemings to Winnie Mandela to Amiri Baraka; from his daughter’s birth to the outrage of clitoridectomy, Hoagland’s heart, his intelligence and his power of language interact in this honest and sometimes lacerating collection.

Praise for . . . Here . . .

"Everett Hoagland's is the poetry of registered experience, of sharpened perception rationalized into poetic "use" of great effectiveness. What he speaks of through ironies, delineates, derogates, praises. These are crystallized self-revelations, emotionally powered, intellectually burnished, self-possessions of a sensibility still searching for the fullest clarity of Who, What, Where, Why?
     A clarity in and of the world, which, as it effloresces with each new work, beats sound-word-image like the log of a very old say-lore (griot-french) Djali, like the most ancient poets'  'Glee Club.' It's how we have raised the sun, each AM, from Osiris, through Orpheus: Douglass and DuBois and Langston and Zora and Sterling and Margaret and Jimmy and Lorraine and Henry Dumas and Them.
     Or Roumain, Mikey Smith, Guillen, Neruda and Them. All Them Thems is We. One of Them Thems is Hoagland. Hoagland makes us remember
to Shine. Which is our write-ful name! "
                                              —Amiri Baraka

"Every person in the world stands in need of a poet/friend, someone who cares and someone who comprehends. Everett Hoagland is just such a poet/friend. I sure am glad he's mine."
                                            —Maya Angelou

"The passion of Everett Hoagland's social and historical consciousness match the skill of his lyrical command and the brilliance of his imagination. That so much of his work is now reachable in one place is a blessing."
                                            —Clarence Major

"This is an important volume. This is a poetry of eloquence and challenge, rooted in the wisdom of his ancestral past and articulated with a confident mastery of his craft. Hoagland is a poet whose sensibility has been seasoned in the rich loam of the black folk heritage where it has been informed by the full range of the Western literary canon."
                                              —Samuel Allen

Everett Hoagland has won the Gwendolyn Brooks Award and two Massachusetts Poetry Fellowships. His poems have appeared in APR, Iowa Review, Essence and The Progressive. Originally from Philadelphia, he teaches at the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth) and reads widely around the country. He is the former Poet Laureate of New Bedford, where he makes his home.