In the spirit of the great Langston Hughes, Walter Rooks’ Nothing More offers a revealing take on the African American experience. Collected here are more than sixty poems chronicling love, personal struggle, endurance and transition. Distinctly influenced by his twentieth century predecessors, Rooks nevertheless strikes out on his own, expressing the unique hopes, anxieties and experiences of a new generation of African American poets. In blues clubs and jazz joints, on the streets of Harlem and the shores of Key West, Rooks struggles to find his place in white America. The subjects are by turns intensely personal and sweepingly universal, touching on poverty, institutional racism and America’s slave history. Through it all is a strong empathy for the human condition in all its forms—the lovelorn drunkard, the poorly paid maid, the civil rights pioneer—and a firm sense in the dignity and beauty of man. A sense, as he says, that “Sun shines / On black bodies, / Gives hope to old sorrow, / Life to song we’ll sing tomorrow.”