Poetry. Linton Kwesi Johnson is the most influential black poet in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. MI REVALUESHANARY FREN includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things. "The man writes some of the most moving poetry to be found in popular music"--David Bowie. Includes a full-length CD of Johnson reading.

Joan Houlihan (born 1951 in Newton, Massachusetts) is the author of three books, including the forthcoming collection of poetry, The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009), and The Mending Worm (New Issues Press), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry. She has written a series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment, which drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and avant garde poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International and wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical Houlihan is a staff reviewer for Contemporary Poetry Review and is editor of the online poetry magazine Perihelion, and poetry editor for Del Sol Press. Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Pleiades, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, VOLT and the Boston Review, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and An Anthology of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present (University of Notre Dame, 2006). The Mending Worm has been described by Lucie Brock-Broido as "a book of stunning accomplishment" and by Frederick Marchant as one that "gives us poems that in their art and authenticity render whole that which has been shattered."Ellen Wehle, poetry editor of AGNI magazine and poetry reviewer, states: "Writers are told 'make it fresh, make it new.' In The Mending Worm it's all new. Houlihan wields language like a weapon, carving out lines that are stingingly precise." In a more ambivalent review, Simon DeDeo, editor of rhubarb is susan, describes Houlihan's work as "setting concepts to music and, crucially, not allowing those concepts to alter, complexify, distort, within the poem itself." Houlihan is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Confe