Description

Our Bookseller says…

“Like a lot of us I think, most of the poetry I had to read in school was written by ancient pretentious, white dudes. Most of that poetry felt inaccessible and just really really…dusty. The Breakbeat Poets has a life to it, a rhythm and lyricism that celebrates all that is new. There’s a youthful excitement to every line, whether the poem itself is humorous or sobering. The whole collection is so insightful and lively, and I encourage anyone who still harbors a distaste for poetry to consider this collection a reintroduction to the form.”

-Sam

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.

The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.