A review by mwhits
Selected Poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson

4.0

My initial reaction to this text being on my reading list this term was oof.. I am out of my depths here. But with the trusty aid of Youtube, I found myself enthralled by Kwesi Johnson’s work. Not only does he write with genuine passion and unshackled emotion, but he writes as a literary activist, rather than an angry youth. This distinction forces the reader to listen beyond compassion for his traumatising accounts of racial violence, and into the fight behind it, more so, how you must join the fight too. His poetry screams of the Black Lives Matter Movement; heartbreaking as it happened 40 years after some of these poems were written. The scary prevalence of the topics he discussed still being issues in the 21st century just shows how much progress we still need to make.