Poet and critic, Sherley Anne Williams uses her poignantly lyrical voice to speak for and to the reader, often singing a blues so real that when one reads her poems, one unconsciously supplies the music and begins a foot-stomping, down-home rhythm of one's own. That Williams can render the cadence of the blues so accurately attests to her skill; that she uses the blues to reach back and bring the past to the present attests to her role as a tradition bearer and puts her firmly in that long line of artists that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of black folk culture. In her writings, Williams mentions Alice Walker, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and Toni Morrison as black artists who make a conscious effort to carry on the past of their ancestors in their...