Description
Product Description
In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, Nikki Giovanni has earned the reputation as one of America’s most celebrated and contoversial writers.Now, she presents a stunning collection of love poems that includes more than twenty new works.

From the revolutionary “Seduction” to the tender new poem, “Just a Simple Declaration of Love,” from the whimsical “I Wrote a Good Omelet” to the elegiac “All Eyez on U,” written for Tupac Shakur, these poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Nikki Giovanni is beloved and revered.

Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems expresses notions of love in ways that are delightfully unexpected. Articulating in sensuous verse what we know only instinctively, Nikki Giovanni once again confirms her place as one of our nations’s most distinguished poets and powerful truth-tellers.

In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, starting with her explosive early years in the Black Rights Movement, Nikki Giovanni has earned a reputation as one of America’s most celebrated and controversial writers. Her mind-speaking work has made her a universal favorite and a number-one best-seller.The love poems-the revolutionary “Seduction,” the whimsical “I Wrote a Good Omelet,” and the tender “My House” to name just a few-are among the most beloved of all Nikki Giovanni’s works. Now, Love Poems brings together these and other favorites with over twenty new poems. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems will once again confirm Nikki Giovanni’s place among the country’s most renowned poets and truth tellers.
From Library Journal
The bold, romantic, and sometimes erotic poems found here include “Seduction,” “I Wrote a Good Omelet,” and “My House.”
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In one way or another, love shapes most of Giovanni’s smart, to-the-point, and emotionally candid poems, but it’s wonderful to have a volume devoted strictly to her love poems, especially since it contains 20 new compositions. Giovanni is one of America’s most popular poets, because she speaks her mind clearly and has such a good time doing it. As she writes in “A Poem: For Langston Hughes”: “wool is sheared . . . silk is spun / weaving is hard . . . but words are fun,” a sentiment she brings to rich fruition in her more playful poems, rhyming wonders reminiscent of old blues lyrics where every line is a double entendre, the sort of hand-on-your-hip songs Bessie Smith and Dinah Washington sashayed and smiled their way through. But Giovanni turns more somber and reflective as she expresses the love of a daughter and mother, and a woman’s deep-down love for a man that far outlasts the giddy romp of romance. Donna Seaman

Review
1995
All Eyez On U
And I Have You
And Yeah…this Is A Love Poem
August
Balances
Beautiful Black Men
The Butterfly
Cancers (not Necessarily A Love Poem)
Communication
For Theresa
For Tommy
Giddiyap
A Greater Love Of God And Country
A Happy Reason
Her Flying Trapeze
How Do You Write A Poem?
I Do Have My Likes And Dislikes
I Take Master Card
I Want To Sing
I Wrote A Good Omelet
Just A New York Poem
Just A Simple Declaration Of Love
Kidnap Poem
Love In Place
Love Is
Luxury
Mothers
My House
No Furnaces (for Valentine’s Day)
The Only True Lovers Are Chefs Or Happy Birthday, Edna Lewis
A Poem
Poem
A Poem Of Friendship
Poetry Is A Trestle
Rain
Resignation
Seduction
A Summer Love Poem
Swaziland
Telephone Poem
That Day
A Theory Of Pole Beans
Things That Go Together
Three/quarters Time
The Way I Feel
What It Is
When Gamble And Huff Ruled
When I Nap
You Are There
You Came, Too
You Were Gone
— Table of Poems from

More than twenty new poems are included in this anthology, which gathers the black author’s love poems. This just missed February feature for Valentine’s Day but deserves ongoing, year-round mention as an excellent gathering of Giovanni classics centered around a powerful theme. — Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher
In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, starting with her explosive early years in the Black Rights Movement, Nikki Giovanni has earned a reputation as one of America’s most celebrated and controversial writers. Her mind-speaking work has made her a universal favorite and a number- one best-seller.

The love poems — the revolutionary “Seduction,” the whimsical “I Wrote a Good Omelet,” and the tender “My House” to name just a few-are among the most beloved of all Nikki Giovanni’s works. Now, Love Poems brings together these and other favorites with over twenty new poems. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems will once again confirm Nikki Giovanni’s place among the country’s most renowned poets and truth tellers.

About the Author
Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, and professor, is a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, among many other honors. The author of twenty-eight books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.