This classic anthology, a favorite of students, scholars, and general readers for decades, spans three generations to offer some 200 poems composed by African Americans.

"[A] vital, revealing collection."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Can there be poetry about the Holocaust? Isn't this kind of writing an attempt to escape—or to exploit—the suffering of millions? Poet and anthologist Schiff confronts these questions in her eloquent introduction. One answer she finds is that to remain silent is also to lie. Fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, great literature about the Holocaust has grown to a flood . . . The pieces here are of astonishing power. In English and in translation from many languages, [nearly 60] poets—including Wiesel, Fink, Brecht, Yevtushenko, Auden, and Sachs—give voice to what seems unspeakable. Schiff points out that compelling historical accounts document the facts and numbers, but a poem, like a story, makes us imagine how it felt for one person. These poems are stark and deceptively simple. No one can read them all at once. Each poem leaves you with an indelible memory. In words of one syllable, the Polish poet Rozewicz writes about having to reinvent language after Auschwitz ('this is a man / this is a tree this is bread' ). There's no healing in this tragedy: the last poem, by Primo Levi, is like a shout of rage to us to remember."—Hazel Rochman, Booklist

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award

"This is a masterpiece and will surely rank as one of the best translations of a classic in the English language . . . This is for every reader in our time and possibly for all time."—Library Journal

"Splendid . . . Pinsky's verse translation is fast-paced, idiomatic, and accurate. It moves with the concentrated gait of a lyric poem . . . It maintains the original's episodic and narrative velocity while mirroring its formal shape and character . . . Pinsky succeeds in creating a supple American equivalent for Dante's vernacular music where many others have failed."—Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker

"I have never come across a book quite like this one: so unfraught, so uncontentious, so lucid and gentlemanly. I cannot imagine that even the most wised-up spouter of poetry would not find it irresistible."—Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

Here is an afforable, compact, longtime bestseller featuring over 100 of Frost's best-known poems.