Jazzoetry Lives is a slim but spiritually packed collection of poems rooted in Black history, jazz, memory, grief, and resistance. Author J. Vern Cromartie frames “jazzoetry” as a living form, one that moves through The Last Poets, Langston Hughes, blues traditions, Black Arts voices, and the ache of contemporary racial violence. The poems travel from Congo Square and the Satilla River to Alabama, Oakland, Ohio, and beyond, carrying tributes to figures like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kamau Seitu, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Zahieb Mwongozi, and Langston Hughes. What emerges is less a conventional poetry collection than a call-and-response across generations, with music acting as both memory and medicine.

Cromartie’s lines often return like a chant, and at their best, that return feels ceremonial rather than merely structural. In “Alabama,” the repeated cry of the title and the invocation of Coltrane create a sorrowful music that gathers Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church, capitalism, and mourning into one long, bruised breath. “And the Killings Go On” is even more direct, almost painfully so, naming Bobby Hutton, Betty Scott, Melvin Black, and Oscar Grant in a cadence that refuses the reader any easy distance. The book isn’t interested in decorative grief. It wants the wound visible.

The writing has a raw quality that feels tied to performance. Some poems read as if they’re waiting for drums, a bassline, or a room full of people murmuring back. “A Gathering of Sounds” captures that beautifully, with music exploding into fragments and sheets of sound before slipping into silence. I liked how Cromartie treats jazz not as background atmosphere but as a way of thinking, remembering, and surviving. At the same time, the collection can feel uneven when its political declarations become too blunt, as in “Elon Musk has a God Complex,” where the anger is clear. Even there, I respected the book’s refusal to soften its judgments. Its ideas are fierce, ancestral, and unapologetically Black, and its best moments make history feel less like a record than a rhythm still beating under the floorboards.

By the end, especially with the inclusion of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” I felt the collection circling back to its deepest concern: the freedom of Black artists to speak from their own ground without apology, translation, or disguise. Jazzoetry Lives is warm-blooded, grieving, insistent, and often moving. I’d recommend it to readers who care about Black poetic traditions, jazz-inflected verse, political poetry, and work that carries the weight of cultural memory with both tenderness and fire.

Pages: 54