This is a collection of spoken word poetry and critical essays.  The anthology also includes pictures, illustrations and a CD with audio performances of the poems.  There are introductions with brief biographies of each artist which include explanations of their craft.  The critical essays address the history of Spoken Word, Slam, hip-hop poetry and other poetic forms including the negative responses they received from literary scholars and professional poets.

Eleveld and Smith state that, “spoken word encompasses many movements, yet they all share a common credo, namely, that their poetry is designed to be performed in front of an audience” (xiii).  The editors make the argument that there has been “a continuation and rebirth of the oral tradition” in America and around the world.  They call the continuation and rebirth The Spoken Word Revolution.   Mark Smith, the creator of Poetry Slams argues that “when poetry went from the oral tradition to the page, someone should’ve asked, is that really poetry?  I think slam gets poetry back to its roots, breathing life into words” (2).  While, Jerry Quickley argues that “Hip hop embodies a form of poetry just like sonnets, villanelles, litanies, renga and other forms” (38).  He explains that Hip hop utilizes “many of the technical devices of other forms, including slant rhymes, enjambment, A-B rhyme schemes and other techniques, usually parsed in sixteen-bar stanzas, and generally followed by four-to-eight-bar hooks” (38).  My favorite essay from the anthology is “The Future of Language” by Saul Williams.  Williams states, “A Latin transcription of the word person is ‘being of sound’.  As human beings, we communicate with each other and the greater universe through sound vibration.  It is thus the essence of our collective being.  All sounds reverberate with meaning” (58).  He goes on to explain how many cultures have lost their connection to “the passionate roots of their language” and because of this have possibly become “disconnected from the root of human existence” (58).   Williams, Eleveld, Smith and many of the other artists argue that through the spoken word, slam, hip hop and additional new forms of poetry we are regaining skills and connections that have been lost.

One of my favorite poems in the anthology is “So Edgar Allen Poe Was in this Car”