Carolyn Marie Rodgers is best known as one of the new black poets to emerge from the Chicago Organization of Black American Culture during the 1960s. A Chicago native, she has spent most of her career as a poet in that city; however, she has achieved a national reputation, largely since the mid-1970s, because of her thematic concerns with feminist issues, particularly those affecting the black woman in a changing society. Her earliest poems, collected in Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Blackbird (1969), repeat the tenets of black revolutionary thought characteristic of the new black poetry, but they also contain the seeds of ideas about women's roles, female identity, and mother-daughter relationships that mark her mature accomplishment in how i got ovah (1975) and The Heart As Ever Green (1978). With these two volumes, Carolyn Rodgers has become one of the strongest voices among contemporary poets and one of...