“Jayne Cortez is an energy, a nourishment, a Black Nation song” — Gwendolyn Brooks

The dynamic, vibrant work of poet, activist, and artist Jayne Cortez (1934–2012) is gathered together and introduced by Margaret Busby in this comprehensive collection. Spanning 43 years and representing a wide range of Cortez’s creative eras, each section illuminates how expansive and genre-bending the poet’s extraordinary body of work remained over the decades.

Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”