The Dead Lecturer: Poems

A copy of LeRoi Jones's second poetry collection with a remarkable piece of provenance: inscribed on the front free endpaper in a previous owner's hand, "Imamu Amiri Baraka / Oct 7, 1934" — the name Jones took when he converted to Islam after the Newark rebellion and the birth date he celebrated as a political and spiritual transformation. Someone kept track of who this poet was becoming.

The Dead Lecturer (1964) is the pivot point in Jones's career. The vivid, jazz-inflected imagery of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note is still present, but the tone has darkened and the political charge has intensified. The poems move from lyric to polemic and back, from intimate observation to cold fury, the work of a writer who was in the process of deciding what poetry was for. Grove Press published it through their Evergreen imprint (E-386). This is the thirteenth printing.