Given the facts of his life, it’s remarkable that Etheridge Knight wrote any poetry. After dropping out of school in Kentucky in the eighth grade and serving as a medical technician in Korea, where he suffered a shrapnel wound, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, turned to crime, and in 1960 went to prison for robbery. Inspired there by the words of Malcolm X and Langston Hughes, however, he began to write, and by his release in 1968 was a published poet. Along with his wife Sonia Sanchez he became a key figure in the Black Arts Movement, and continued to create original verse that told blunt truths and shared a hard-earned wisdom.