If you want a poetry anthology of that will bring you the major contemporary Black poets, a broad selection of Black poets you might not have read yet but should, and enough timeless poems to keep you enriched for years, this is the book for you. This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander, brings poems of praise, poems of political awareness, poems of great historical breadth, poems of the kitchen table, love poems, wildly imaginative poems.

The anthology begins with a section of poems on joy, and moves into poems on identity, on spirituality, on race and rage, and ends with a section of praise poems. This arrangement moves the reader from joy to insight and history and understanding, and finally back to joy and praise. It’s a rewarding read with good challenges, good trouble, along the way.

The very first poem is Nikki Giovanni’s “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” which is the single poem every person in this world needs most. It is a knock-out. The poem beckons NASA to look to Black people for help figuring out what to do when the astronauts “pull away from earth” and can no longer see it, because Black people have had this experience already, and sustained themselves with Billie Holiday, with “a slice or two of meatloaf and if you can manage it / some fried chicken in a shoebox” and of course “a bottle of beer because no one should go that far with- / out a beer and maybe a six-pack so that if there is life on Mars / you can share.” This is a poem of riches, built on an awareness of the cost, the loss, the rage, but focused on the riches.

Many of these poems are alive with the living history of all who have come before. They are not just remembered, they are present. In Reginald Harris’s “Reunion,” his sister “argues politics / with Martin and Coretta in the back yard / over ribs—Romare Bearden’s cooking—/Malcolm puts his two cents in between / bites of peas and rice.” A number of the praise poems bring role models and cultural icons and grandmothers into the present, ever-present, a warm kind of eternity.

The unabashed glory of celebrating the self rings through many of the poems. In Nicholas Goodly’s “R&B Facts” there is a hard acknowledgment that “If no black boys were murdered we / would have voices that speak in song / and the music we’d make would birth storms” – and then an insistence: “Melanin is a blessing / that is ours like gold / melting in our hands / Melanin is light on every / surface of the day / There is no color on earth / that is not some child’s favorite”.

It's a great anthology, one that I expect will be timeless.

Thanks to #netgalley, and #Little, Brown and Company for the ARC. ( )