Ryan Sharp's Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive in Context

I've been thinking and writing about African American persona poems for quite some time, so of course I was excited to read Ryan Sharp's new book Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). 

Sharp's book makes unique contributions and also connects to various projects on African American poetry. 

Before moving forward, I feel obligated to note that we don't have scholarly works on African American poetry. Last year, I pulled together a list of more than 150 scholarly works. Few of those books concentrated on Black poetry. 

The absence of scholarship on contemporary African American verse is one reason I'm excited about the contributions of Sharp's book. Another Throat joins another recent book, Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition (Ohio State University Press, 2024). I treated some aspects of contemporary Black poetry in my book Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020), but Sharp and Vrana really extend things. 

Sharp builds on research offered in The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2011) by Meta DuEwa Jones. His writing on poetry also had me thinking of Revolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement (2023) by Sarah RudeWalker.

Sharp contributes to the broader discourse on African American poetry that we've seen over the last decade and a half. I'm thinking of books like The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka ((2013) by Kathy Lou Schultz, Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (2021) by Anthony Reed, and A History of African American Poetry (2019) by Lauri Scheyer, just to name a few. 

Sharp focuses on persona poems, but I thought of The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018) by Timo Müller and Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (2010) by Jon Woodson, because those scholars take a look at common modes of writing among Black poets.