Use Trouble

Stephen Henderson Award, African American Literature and Culture Society (AALCS), 2013. Author is a recipient of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, Poetry Society of America, 2008.

"This virtuosic, symphonic, embracive collection is a memoir, a reader's notebook, a professor's lesson plan, a family scrapbook, and a poet's book of gratitude."--Booklist

"Expansive, eloquent volume in which Harper locates and contacts his artistic ancestors in verse that is as richly textured as it is troubling.”--Rain Taxi

"A splendid hit."--Multicultural Review

"An amazingly rich and raw chronicle of family, friends, history, and creativity, Use Trouble is Michael S. Harper at the pinnacle of success and the depths of blues. This is poetry that goes way back into a lifetime of observation at the crossroads, of Robert Johnson-like deals with the devil, of writing through passion and pain, all with a sly wicked eye for seeing what needs knowing and telling. Harper uses the wisdom of his elders to transform trouble into his own hard-edged art, a soaring retrospective of personal witnessing."--Thadious M. Davis, author of Games of Property "From tragic meditations on American public life and history to searingly perceptive ruminations on the griefs and epiphanies of a private soul, Michael S. Harper uses trouble to illuminate and document his complicated life's journey as a son, father, poet, American, and black man. His perceptions of trouble wind, float, and burn through the mind in a way that is echoed in the lines and forms of the poems themselves, forcing and allowing us as readers ever closer to the actual processes of poetic vision and interpretation."--Anthony Walton, author of Mississippi: An American Journey and coeditor of The Vintage Book Of African American Poetry