Real Life Rock Top 10

10) Blues Poems, edited by Kevin Young (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) Dozens of poems, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, not too many songs. Rhythms are sometimes forced, but when they're not--as with Gayle Jones's "Deep Song," or Langston Hughes's "Song for a Dark Girl," a rewrite of "Dixie" as a lynching lyric--it's like a whole literature exhaling. And there are continual surprises, like half-cast spells or whispers of forgotten curses, as with Melvin B. Tolson's late '30s "Sootie Joe," where a minstrel speaks through a chimney sweep: "Somebody has to black hisself up/For somebody else to stay white."

Tori Krimes

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