Blues in Stereo

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, work-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems see Hughes finding his voice and experimenting with style and form. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. 

Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. His poems and journal entries celebrate love as a tool of liberation. His songs showcase the musicality of verse poetry. And the collection even includes a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.

Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Beautifully rendered and thoughtfully curated, Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.  
 

• “This thoughtfully assembled and arranged volume honors a corner of a legendary poet's life that we, the readers, do not always get to honor after a poet is not with us in the earthly sense, and their legacy has outpaced their living. In Blues in Stereo, we get to witness a young poet, a poet figuring out the work and the self in tandem, clearly brimming with potential, turning corners as they arrived. This book is not only a gift for what it gives us of Hughes, but additionally, it is a gift to any poet working at any stage of their life and career, needing a reminder that there is more to reach for.” 
  Hanif Abdurraqib, MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award Finalist, author of There’s Always This Year and Little Devil in America
• “Langston Hughes transformed the way America understood Black literature and transformed the way the world understood Black life. He wrote directly into the fullness and complexity of the Black experience. The suffering. The joy. The violence. The resilience. His poetry revels in the music of our language. His love for his people leaps from the page. What a gift that Danez Smith, one of our greatest living poets, serves as our guide through this stunning collection of Hughes’ early work. What a gift that we get to see the past and present meeting in this beautiful way.”
  Clint Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Above Ground and How the Word is Passed
• “This collection of Hughes's early work allows us to see the great poet he would become for the young genius he was. Some of these early poems are some of your favorite poems, proving that possibility for longevity only exists if we get started now! I am grateful for this volume and for Hughes's willingness to follow his dream and his commitment to write about dreams his entire life.”  
  Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Tradition and editor of How We Do It