In this Whitman-esque ode to time and the city, the “crazy quilt patterns” of Harlem are reflected in the voices of the neighborhood’s “big-time people and its struggling folk,” of little girls and blind old veterans, poets and mechanics, boxers and nannies, ballplayers and blues singers, laborers and jazz artists. Echoes of Cullen, Hughes, and Hurston, Baldwin, Wright, and DuBois, Marcus, Malcolm, and Martin, Booker T., Van Der Zee, and the Duke reverberate in this chorus of voices, modeled on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. The volume celebrates the varied music of the neighborhood—plaintive, joyful, expansive, sly, and bluesy—and photographs from the author’s collection offer a superb visual complement. One of Myers’s best—and that’s saying a lot. Sure to be a classic. (Poetry. 12+)
