In Black Music, Black Poetry: Blues and Jazz's Impact on African American Versification editor Gordon E. Thompson collects eleven essays on interconnections between black music and poetry. Based on a 2007 conference on the subject, the book takes a broad historical scope, combining a more or less chronological order – ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present – with a thematic structure. Part I (out of four), “Authenticity in Black Music and Poetry,” comprises four essays, two of which examine the musicality of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry. While Ray Sapirstein reevaluates Dunbar's use of secular music, including his reconfiguration of the banjo, Lauri Ramey demonstrates the significance of the spirituals in Dunbar's work. Besides pointing to interconnections between Dunbar and the slave songs as written scores, Ramey also considers actual performances of Dunbar's poetry by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The volume then moves on to a discussion of Langston Hughes's and Sterling Brown's negotiation of black authenticity. In his examination of the correspondence between Hughes and Brown, John Edgar Tidwell illuminates Hughes's early blues-inspired work. In Brown's early reading of Hughes's work Tidwell sees the prefiguration of “the aesthetic bases of such current scholars as Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, and many others” (66). David Chinitz's essay on Langston Hughes's blues poetry concludes Part I with a discussion of Hughes's concept of authenticity. According to Chinitz, rather than representing an attempt at authentic racial representation, Hughes's poetry is marked by a self-conscious “urge toward authenticity” that does not preclude the notion that such authenticity is unattainable (75).

The primary focus of Parts II–IV, then, lies on the legacy of word–music relations in African American poetry and music from the latter half of the twentieth century. In the first chapter of Part II, “Jazz: Its Spiritual Lyricism,” Tony Bolden examines the poetry of Sterling Plumpp and Duriel Harris, demonstrating how both poets make use of and develop a “funk aesthetic,” defined as both ethos and a distinct style or idiom. In the case of Harris's 2003 poetry collection Drag, this ethos spawns a feminist rewriting of P-Funk's dominant masculinist elements. That this chapter on a distinct funk aesthetic is subsumed under the title “jazz” points to the book's inclusive definition of jazz as transmedial and stylistically diverse, thus embracing the expansive definition that has been promoted by New Jazz studies scholars since the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the section's final chapter, Joseph A. Brown discusses spirituality and “the missionary impulse” in Michael Harper's poetry, claiming that “the greatness of the achievement of Harper is that he becomes a witness to his own redemption” (94).

The third part of the collection comprises three essays on what Thompson terms the “sonic aesthetic” in black poetry. Christopher Winks's nuanced reading of Amiri Baraka's poetry considers Baraka's great development as a poet over the past fifty years. Winks is particularly interested in the ways in which Baraka's poetry evokes the sound of actual jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. In several close readings of poems by Nathaniel Mackey, Scarlett Higgins outlines the use of what Mackey himself calls “transcendent lyric,” characterized by a speaker who “both is and is not speaking from his own experience” (118). Lisa Mansell concludes this section with an innovative analysis of Harryette Mullen's work. As Mansell demonstrates, Mullen's poetry can be approached through the musicological method of harmonic analysis.

The volume's final section, then, discusses music and poetry rather than music in poetry. Renee M. Kingan locates the interactions between Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters in free-jazz aesthetics and in the Black Arts Movement. In a similar vein, Michael Coyle's discussion of the lyrics to Pharaoh Sanders's “The Creator Has a Master Plan” reassesses both Sanders's musical legacy and lyricist Amos Leon Thomas's significance as a poet. Providing a list of eighty adaptations of the piece, Coyle concludes that while all of the variations use Thomas's original lyrics, none of them consider the entire complexity of Sanders's music, thus testifying to the music's inscrutability.

This list of adaptations concluding both Coyle's article and the collection may be taken as an illustration of the book's central message: Black Music, Black Poetry details how African American word–music collaborations continue to be central to twenty-first-century culture. However, the plurality of black music and poetry also challenges attempts to approach them with standardized methodologies and concepts. For this reason, one would wish for a greater degree of dialogue between the various contributors to this volume. Thompson does define such concepts as “black lyric poetry” in his introduction, for instance, but none of his definitions are self-consciously debated by individual authors. This lack of dialogue notwithstanding, Thompson's Black Music, Black Poetry stands as a highly significant, thought-provoking collection of essays that help to bridge an artificial, academic divide between two fields that have always been artistically inseparable.