Giovanni first garnered attention as a revolutionary poet with her book Black Judgement in 1968. Known then primarily for her angry verse, Giovanni's critics and supporters alike paid more attention to her themes of revolution than her larger themes of family and love. In 1971, Don L. Lee commented in his Dynamite Voices, "Nikki writes about the familiar: what she knows, sees, experiences. It is clear why she conveys such urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, solidarity. She knows how it was. She knows how it is. She knows also that a change can be affected."

Giovanni early on seems to have departed from her political stance with her poem "Knoxville, Tennessee." One senses that beneath the revolutionary is a woman truly at peace with herself and her past. Suzanne Juhasz commented in Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition...