“A LOVE POEM OF SORTS” a lot of these poems
like simple spring flowers
stem from the jazz traditon
and, yes, as she admits,
some are really silly
and you know something?
love IS sometimes funny…
want to hear something even funnier?
I bought this book simply because
I fell in love with the author
photograph on its back jacket!

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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.

Silly & Somewhat Trivial Doses of Giovanni
I can’t tell you how many times my eyes rolled while reading through this. It reminded me of the worst aspects of contemporary verse–self-indulgent, cliche, and ultimately unsatisfying–a bit like eating a cheese burger at McDonald’s, when there’s so many better things to eat elsewhere. The older pieces are the best, but the bulk of the rest is just silly….more info

Ugh! A Collection of Trite Yuppiness from a Former Radical
First off–I loved Nikki Giovanni. I say loved because the person she was–outspoken and radical–has dissipated into this soft pile of yuppie mush. She has chapters and poems dedicated to “Charging her love” (as in, through a MasterCard) and how good cashmere feels. This from a woman who used to speak about being gunned down by the CIA, about her fallen radical Black brothers, and about the price she paid to be armed and intelligent in a racist American. What a strange path she’s taken to emerge as such a pandering cliche. No wonder the other reviewers treat this horrible collection as an accoutrement to a Nite of Luv (in case Victoria’s Secret is closed that night). Her packaged, sing-song banalities deserve that type of treatment.

What’s particularly painful is when one of her early poem is included, casting light on the difference between Nikki then and now. The lyrical beauty she possessed–showing that anger and love often spring from the same passion–only highlights the shallowness of her current verse. The ideas she expressed within this dualism were conflicted, and therefore refreshing and real. Her early work, like the poem “For Theresa”, had a luminescence in it’s sadness and a youthful righteousness not often seen in published poetry. (Please check out her early collection “Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement”.) Like many of her generation, though, she must have decided that anger was not sustainable, and that luxury and platitudes were easy and more pleasing to the crowd. Based on the frothing customer comments about this collection, her bet was a good one. How sad for the rest of us, who believed what she said in those early works….more info

let’s not get carried away
the difference in style and content between her love poems and her earlier works does not discredit her talent. i loved her then and i love her now. tolstoy said that all happy stories are the same and yes, love poems can be trite. giovanni, however, captures the undercurrents of what it means to be in love–the unimaginable joy, the confusion, the warm fuzzy feeling, and even the anger and frustration that come along with loving someone.

the poems are soft and mushy, empty of political conflict, but rife with passion–just like love….more info