Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
By Lucinda Dyer,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Powerful poems celebrate a generation of Black women poets.
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What's the Story?
The poems of LEGACY: WOMEN POETS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE are about oppression and racism, family life, dreams both fulfilled and never achieved, women who feel invisible and women embracing their power. Grimes responds to Helene Johnson's "I Am Not Proud" ("I am not proud that I am bold. Or proud that I am black") with "Having My Say," which encourages readers to speak up and be bold. "For me, boldness is a requirement that came as part of my Black-girl package, along with my sass, and my bodacious hip-swing!" Her "Room for Dreams" ("With no limitations, my fantasies of a boundless future balloon inside my head") is a heartbreaking contrast to the woman in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew," whose head is "weighed down with dreams." Grimes turns Esther Popel's poem "Flag Salute" about a lynching into "A Mother's Lament," that speaks of a woman's hope "to one day to be treated equal to the sons of the ones who shipped us naked to these shores, under freedom's flag." Ellie Lee Newsome thanks God she is brown ("Eagles are of this same hue") in "The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy)," and Grimes writes in "Like An Eagle" that she "wouldn't trade my melanin skin for any other hue."
Is It Any Good?
Poems written by an often overlooked and undervalued generation of Black women inspire new works by a modern day feminist poet with "sass." This is a legacy offered in words. Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance is not only a book for young readers with an interest in poetry or history. Young artists are certain to be captivated by the extraordinary illustrations and inspired by the biographies of the artists.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about which poems in Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance they found the most powerful. Was it the poems of the writers from the Harlem Renaissance or the modern poems of Nikki Grimes?
In Grimes' poem "What Girls Can Do," she talks about someone who tries to put girls in a box that would limit their potential. Do you ever feel you've been put in a box where you don't belong?
How can poems written by people who actually lived it bring history alive in ways that facts never can?
Book Details
- Author: Nikki Grimes
- Genre: Poetry
- Topics: Activism , Great Girl Role Models , History
- Book type: Fiction
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Children's Books
- Publication date: January 5, 2021
- Publisher's recommended age(s): 10 - 14
- Number of pages: 144
- Available on: Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, Kindle
- Last updated: November 5, 2021
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