Lyric Histories

Abstract While poetic excavations of an un(der)documented Black past have long been part of the African American literary tradition, two techniques have been especially prevalent in the twenty-first century: persona poetry, in which poets inhabit the first-person perspective of historical figures and phenomena; and research-based poetics, or the citation and contravention of archival materials. Two recent books, Ryan Sharp’s Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black U.S. Persona Poetry and the Archive (2024) and Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry (2024), provide the most focused and comprehensive critical accounts to date of the poetry genealogies, theoretical frameworks, and tour-de-force collections that have given rise to this new era in African American historical poetry. Taken together, Sharp’s and Debo’s studies, alongside the collections they examine, do not purport to solve the dilemma of archival elision or erasure, but they do rightly insist on the importance of counter-archives and counter-stories in an era when the residue of past injustices is everywhere in plain sight.