Rating: - Simple but deep poetry... inspiring!
This book of poetry was so fun and fast-paced that I read it all in one sitting. Some of the poems are so incredibly simple that they speak right to you and you say "hmm... that's so true", but the concept is so deep you never would have thought about it in such a simple way. Other poems are really inspiring and they will make you think a lot about them before going on to the next one.

In this Vintage Edition, the poems are grouped according to categories. For instance, "Afro-American Fragments" has a whole series of poems that speak of slavery and segregation that helped me understand even better the life of the people who overcame these tragedies, while "Lament Over Love" speaks about the pains of unrequited love that just about anyone can relate to. One of my favorite categories was "Madam to You", which is a series of poems all about one lady and what she does during her life, such as "Madam and the Rent Man" and "Madam and the Phone Bill Collector".

I was lucky to have read these poems so soon after reading The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois, because it embraced the theme of double conciousness that I found there. It also showed the double conciousness of African-Americans in regard to religion, which is an important theme in DuBois' book.

While I read the book I marked the pages of the poems I liked a lot. By the time I was finished I had a huge amount of dog-eared pages marking my "favorite" spots!

I haven't read many complete books of poetry but I extremely enjoyed this one and it prompted me to read more. I recommend it for anyone, whether you're new to reading a lot of poetry at once (like me), or whether you are a poetry fanatic who for some reason have failed to get your hands on poetry by Langston Hughes yet.