Akashiclassics: Renegade Reprint: The System of Dante's Hell (Paperback)

from michaelg16

Hot beautiful angry poetry flowing like lava out of the mouth of a sixties art volcano is a more accurate description than the narrative novel described on the cover copy. I was first introduced to LeRoi Jones when as a college student I was blasted and impressed by reading his plays Dutchman/and...

from NatalieSW

I'd read Dante's "The Inferno" (in English) a couple of times and was very much looking forward to reading this book. Baraka wrote it in 1963 when he was still LeRoi Jones; Woodie King Jr., producer and director of the writer's plays points out in his introduction this was a time when "America ha...

from abealy

The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant prose poem structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno exposing the pain and violence of early 60's Newark slums, a southern youth and the beat precincts of New York's Greenwich Village. Baraka's language sings and his denouement pierces - there is very l...

from mdbrady

Angry, experimental prose by an influential twentieth-century African American. Amiri Baraka (1934-2004) was a leading voice in defining African American literature. He was a poet, a novelist, a music critic, and university teacher who exhorted blacks to create their own artistic forms rather tha...

from kara.shamy

Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant little book I am grateful to have discovered. I had previously read Baraka's criticism (e.g. Blues People, published under the name LeRoi Jones) and was generally familiar with his reputation as a poet. To my knowledge, this is Baraka's onl...