The recurring challenge for faculty designing survey or special topics poetry courses is choosing a good anthology. For African American poetry courses there are only three good options: Arnold Rampersad’s Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry (2005), Michael Harper’s Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000), and Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets (1985). All are comprehensive collections, but each requires supplemental readings in key traditions and periods (spirituals, dialect, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, post-civil rights era). I generally forego the poetry collections in favor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which includes substantial scholarly apparatus and contextual materials, and assign supplementary critical readings such as Tony Bolden on innovation and funk, Joanne Gabbin on the black aesthetic tradition, Keith Leonard on formal poetry, Fred Moten on the black radical tradition, Michael North and Nadia Nurhussein on dialect, Howard Rambsy on the Black Arts Enterprise, and Lauri Ramey on slave songs and poetic innovation.1Anthony Reed’s Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing is a welcome and much needed addition to both African American poetry and experimental poetry syllabi. Reed argues that black experimental writing “challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques” and to “rethink some of the prevailing assumptions surrounding experimental writing in particular” (4). He is correct that “current genealogies of ‘avant-garde’ or experimental writing in English tend to neglect black writing” (3). He is also correct that the “abstractness” of black experimental writing, its resistance to “preemptive understandings of black life,” has resulted in the exclusion of experimental writing in standard genealogies of African American literature.My hope was that Freedom Time would offer a strong and clear argument for inclusion, particularly for experimental black writing of the 1960s when art, as Simon Gikandi reminds us, “had become a mode of calling into question the existing order of things” (2016, 13). Reed’s introduction offers a fine synthesis of the Melvin Tolson-Robert Hayden debate at the 1966 Fisk Writers Conference—a debate essential for anyone working in twentieth-century black poetry and grappling with the question of whether race indeed frames black poetry in advance. Reed explains and defines “racialized reading,” a practice that “provides a selective, occasionally prescriptive account of the project of black aesthetics as one of rejoinder, protest, or commentary, figuring black writing as reactive rather than productive” (7, 8). But at the level of his chapters—all of which offer smart and sustained readings of experimental works that challenge poetic expectations and address directly the question of how to represent visually, spatially, graphically, typographically, repetitively, allusively the often unspeakable, unrepresentable black experience—Reed does not quite do the work of political or poetic integration that he implies is needed.For example, chapter 1, “Broken Witness: Concrete Poetry and a Poetics of Unsaying” reads Terrance Hayes’s “Sonnet” (2002), several works from 1970 and 1971 by the remarkable Umbra poet N. H. Pritchard, and several recent (2001) works by Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philips to highlight Reed’s central claim that “experimentation is not coterminous with innovation that is tied to the protocols of individual or group genius but often entails repurposing, reinterpreting, and redefining older techniques, themselves made legible through multiple traditions” (33). The claim requires some understanding of the protocols and techniques of poetry and black poetry that are being repurposed by Hayes, Pritchard, Philips, and the other experimental writers featured in Freedom Time, but Reed doesn’t situate these protocols in a clear political context.Moreover, Reed’s style is a disservice to the poets featured here. In the first chapter’s extended argument about “facticity” and “concreteness” in language, Reed writes that, “the phenomenality of words—their sublime visual and phonic physicality—suspends the poem between the textural and the textual, between worldliness and wordliness. Ineluctably, poetry temporalizes words: suspends them between the retention of past association and anticipation (what Edmund Husserl called the ‘pretension’ of new associations)” (31). While this observation is true and perhaps even smart, I cannot not call it helpful as a way of reading black experimental writing as such. What he describes may in fact describe all poetry and, if so, does not speak to the particular interventions of Terrance Hayes’s breathtaking “Sonnet,” offered three pages later. (For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the opening line, “We sliced the watermelon into smiles” is repeated thirteen times, with spaces after the fourth, eighth, and twelfth lines, gesturing toward the Shakespearean rather than the Petrarchan sonnet form.) In making the case so strenuously for “Sonnet” as a concrete poem, Reed limits the poem’s deliberate engagement with tradition (including avant-garde poetry and the black sonnet tradition), wrongly suggests that the choice of form is arbitrary, and does not seem to see that Hayes’s sonnet is wickedly funny.Subsequent chapters are equally enlightening and infuriating. Chapter 2, “Establishing Synchronisms: Sycorax Video Style and the Plural Instant” offers readings of works spanning three decades, from the mid 1970s well into the twenty-first century, by the great Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite. The chapter engages robustly with “Sycorax Video Style (SVS),” Brathwaite’s innovative graphic poetics, which involve symbols and bold, oversized typefaces for works utilizing apocope, syncope, and other figures of cutting and expanding. Reed suggests that Brathwaite’s “emphasis on language as a medium through invocation of other media and through the active morphing of language tropes, calls into question the capacities of language and literature” (79). (In its own brief treatment of Brathwaite’s work, Gikandi’s essay, with its remarkable clarity on the relationship of poetics and politics during the Black Arts era, provides a model for writing about poetry that Reed might well seek to emulate.) Chapter 3, “Between Now and Yet: Postlyric Poetry and the Moment of Expression,” engages with the “postlyrical poetics” of Claudia Rankine and Douglas Kearney, offering readings of works from 2004 to 2009 that “bind poetic subjectivity to contemporary events and media through allusion” (100). Reed draws on Rankine and Kearney because in works that seek to disrupt “the assumed solidarity of the speaking, universal ‘I,’” each poet “gives the lyric voice to those whose mundane experiences do not register as worthy: the materializing ‘I’ is given to those whose lives ‘can not matter’” (99). Chapter 4, “Sing It in My Voice: Blues, Irony, and a Politics of Affirmative Difference” analyzes “an aspect of the blues” in several poems by Harryette Mullen (ranging in date from 1995 to 2002) and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s remarkable early work Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The America Play (1994), and Venus (1996) to argue that “an abstracted set of techniques most associated with the blues provides a platform from which to extend the expressive range of black writing” by refusing “reference to some transcendental signifier to anchor or resolve the play of meanings” (135–36). Chapter 5, “Exploding Dimensions of Song: The Utopian Poetics of the Cut” focuses on Nathaniel Mackey’s orphic poetics, connecting music to “an ecstatic loss of self” and involving repetition and reiteration that “allows for a temporal logic similar to that of the phonographic record” (172). One always feels the deliberate incompleteness of Mackey’s poetry, the temporal instability; here at least, Reed’s explications are smart and enlightening.Reed defines experimental writing not once but several times throughout the volume. Experimental writing seeks “through form to expand the range of the thinkable and sayable . . . one way of responding to the presumed conjunction of race and expression” (19). It refers not to method or technique but rather to “expanding the range of the thinkable by calling into question those ideological presuppositions that ‘everyone knows’” (171). Broadly, experimentation involves combinations of elements such as repetition, spacing, musicality, and “graphicity” that enable the poet to broaden the reach of a work.One way to approach the texts featured in Freedom Time is to state what is obvious at first glance as one leafs through its pages: all are designed to startle visually. Some of the pieces appear disorganized or chaotic, some involve crossings out or startling punctuation, some involve strange kernings, as letters are squished together or pulled apart. Bold and alien typefaces occur. Lines might be repeated more than expected. Words are made to mean different things than expected by their placement. Nothing is expected. An aesthetic of deliberate unrecognizability prevails. Reed insists that such “experimental techniques” and race are mutually constitutive. “Black experimental writing . . . describes both the formally innovative writing practices of black writers and the ways that such writing transforms our understandings of race” (9). In other words, for Reed, the innovations or techniques used by black writers are never raceless. Black experimental writing announces itself visually on its own terms, and those terms are black.Freedom Time is best when it focuses on specific poems. With a careful eye Reed analyzes works in painstaking detail—why they are the way they are; how (and why) they defy, subvert, elude, transgress, expand, and defy expectations. The writers and works he focuses on deserve to be read and read seriously; his key contribution is in making sure they are. What does anyone write poetry or criticism for but to give voice to or make sense of something? Yet not all of Reed’s critical framing is helpful. Too often he unnecessarily complicates his project by jumping from author to work, to critical practices, to theoretical paradigms, to “standard views,” and to literary-historical context in ways that obfuscate his train of thought. He begins by situating Freedom Time in “our era of official ‘color blindness,’” yet his use of quotation marks signals his own skepticism about the idea. Certainly in hindsight this opening gambit is ill advised, though understandable—Reed needs to argue for the robust presence of color, of blackness, and must therefore present the argument for erasure. But color blindness isn’t about the attributes of color but about the effects of not-seeing, and in a book about seeing experimental black poetry and about understanding the project of writers who see clearly, beginning with “color blindness” starts a train of argument that is more complicated than it needs to be. It would be good if Reed’s arguments were made more simply because they are generally good arguments.However, much of Freedom Time’s prose is opaque, gnomic, and exhausting; I fear that in assigning chapters, parsing his sentences will take up more discussion time than the works themselves. For example, in chapter 4, which includes readings of Harryette Mullen’s and Susan-Lori Parks’s experimental works, Reed writes that “the affirmative category of blues irony—undermining the closure of concepts—performs the labor of desedimenting the conceptual bases of thought, for example, about the meaning and value of the vernacular” (138). He has already defined blues “as an adjective—a set of techniques, including repetition and citation in addition to irony, that have no meaning on their own” (136). In this chapter and throughout the book, he employs the usual geological terms that lend themselves to poetic analysis—“terrain,” “destabilize,” “embedded,” “undermining,” “central element,” “groundless,” and “fundamental.” But “desedimenting” stopped me short, not simply in confusion about the metaphor itself but also in regard to what it would mean to “desedimentize” a conceptual basis of thought. The entire paragraph, with its long detour through Adorno, jazz, and Ann Douglass’s reference to “earthly liberation,” promises excitement but ultimately fails to deliver any new understanding of what is interesting about Mullen’s or Parks’s experimental engagement with the blues tradition. Those interested in Mullen and Parks would be better off skipping forward to the readings themselves.Certainly Reed’s project of fitting black experimental poetry into the genealogies of African American poetry and experimental poetry is ambitious and requires addressing fundamental questions about categorization. What is poetry? What is experimentation? What is a doubly hyphenated poetics? How do black poets balance the particular and the universal? What is the expectation that works by black writers will be both singular and exemplary? Why are there different expectations for the negotiation of the particular and the universal for black writers? Why do we continue to think genealogically about black poetry? Where does experimentation begin in any genealogy? What accounts for trends in writing, critiquing, and anthologizing? (Intersectionality’s influence has put even more pressure on anthology politics.) These are questions that scholars of black poetry grapple with as a matter of course. I had hoped these questions might be addressed more clearly by Freedom Time.I might add one more question: why mention George Herbert but not Paul Laurence Dunbar, who is sadly nowhere to be found in Freedom Time? In a text that muscularly pushes back on so many “standard” views it is curious to see Reed state that dialect “is a mode of self-referential vernacular invention that purports to record language as it is used, from the vantage point of (and for) those who do not use language that way” (69). While he draws on Michael North to situate dialect in language standardization wars and hints that dialect is about freedom and originality in avant-garde practices, his argument would benefit from an acknowledgment of Dunbar’s dialect innovations, which have been the subject of important recent reconsideration by Nurhussein and others.The prevailing tendency of critics, Reed argues, “to approach black literature exclusively through the thematics of race or the social narrowly conceived, is one factor that has persistently led to the exclusion of the authors considered throughout this book and other black experimental writers from genealogies of presumptively white avant-garde writing, on the grounds that its concerns seem insufficiently ‘universal’” (7). Freedom Time has already begun fighting back. Reed has done significant work in focusing critical attention on important works that need to be brought into conversation with “standard” works in the canon of black poetry, including, of course, Dunbar.