When his first poetry collection, Poems from Prison, was published in 1968 by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, Etheridge Knight was an inmate in Indiana State Prison; his work was hailed by black writers and critics as another excellent example of the powerful truth of blackness in art that the black arts movement, then reaching its height of influence, was promoting. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote of the strong presence of blackness and maleness in Knight's poetry, and in her preface to his Poems from Prison she prophetically identified the enduring characteristic of Knight's poetry: "Vital. Vital./ This poetry is a major announcement." When he was paroled, Etheridge Knight continued to write the poetry he had begun to write in prison in 1963. "Poeting," as he would call it, became a center for his life, and his work became important in Afro-American poetry and poetics and in the strain of Anglo-American poetry descended...