The Brooklyn Rail

A collaboration between the formidable editor Margaret Busby and Nightboat Books, Firespitter (2025) gathers over four decades of Jayne Cortez’s poetry and prose. The volume is the first effort of its kind, bringing together a body of work previously dispersed across the poet’s own self-published chapbooks and broader anthologies, such as Busby’s Daughters of Africa (1992). At nearly seven-hundred pages, the anthology is not simply a cursory glance or “greatest” hits of Cortez’s practice, but functions as a physical reminder of the poet’s prolific output and her claim to be counted among the Black Arts Movement’s defining voices, belatedly shelved beside her peers—Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka—where she always should have been.

The tenderness that the Brooklyn-based literary press has poured into the volume is tangible. Even its design bears the traces of Cortez’s life: illustrations by the artist Melvin Edwards, her longtime partner, appear throughout—marking the front matter and punctuating the divisions between the poet’s individual works—just as the artist had originally illustrated many of her early self-published books. The table of contents, in turn, gives way to a forward by Sapphire, Cortez’s friend and a fellow poet-activist, who calls on “the Firespitter," Cortez’s enduring moniker, as a persona. On Cortez, a “warrior,” she writes, “Fire is dangerous. Fire burns, destroys, cooks, transforms, illuminates. Firespitter does not play it safe. Firespitter says Palestine.” Here, Sapphire offers up Cortez’s political sensibility—her commitment to global solidarity and anti-imperial struggle—politics that are hard, unwavering, unblinking. She moves to mythologize her, casting the writer as a warrior figure, someone to look up to, especially now, as the ongoing realities of genocide, dispossession, and bad faith persistently unfold.

Cortez, born in 1934 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, relocated as a child to Los Angeles, settling in the Watts community. The material immediacy of racism there—encountered in the classroom and in the city—supplanted what she later described in a March 1978 interview with Alexis De Veaux for Essence as the “fantasy world” of her early years in Arizona, where she had first imagined herself as a performer, aspiring, in her earliest registers, to be an actress. Still she locates her true political radicalization elsewhere: in Mississippi, during the summer of 1963, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on voter registration campaigns. That encounter with the structural, violent impediments to enfranchisement furnished the baseline for her poetry. “After the South,” she recalled in the same interview, “I needed to express the struggles of my people—how Black people had been exploited, how only we can do something about our conditions.”

By the latter half of the sixties, Cortez had relocated to New York City and was pursuing poetry in earnest, performing in West Village bars and doing spoken-word performances—where Sapphire recalls first seeing her on stage. Her practice developed through iterative engagements with DIY spaces and self-determined projects: founding the Watts Repertory Theater Company, establishing her own Bola Press to publish her early books, and insisting that Black writers retain full control over their work to resist the blatant distortions of white editors and commercial publishing. Around this time, she also formed her band, The Firespitters, bringing together her poetry with the blues and jazz currents that had always run through her work—from her early admiration of Billie Holiday to her first marriage to Jazz musician Ornette Coleman. From then on, her poems were increasingly performed with live musical accompaniment.

The influence of music—and of the towering figures within its histories—loom behind Cortez’s sensibilities nowhere more vividly than in “The Road,” a poem from her first collection, Pisstained Stairs and Monkey Man’s Wares (1969), which also opens this anthology. In it, Cortez tends to Bessie Smith, the great blues singer of the 1930s, whose death was made all the more tragic by the racial violence of segregation (after a car accident, Smith was refused treatment at a whites-only hospital). Yet Cortez’s gaze does not remain fixed on Smith alone. The poem performs a slippage from the singularity of Smith’s story toward a larger invocation. She writes:

Blue Stone in Memphis
Stony Blue Cries
In Honky-Tonk Taverns
On the road
From K town
To K Town
The road
The same road that downed Bessie in the Ground
And amputated round away over in London Town
Where another Hank moans.

Cortez lifts Smith’s fatal car accident into the register of a broader collective, the “same road,” repeating itself across generations of Black people in the South. Smith, beyond her already well-established celebrity, becomes something bigger than herself, a vehicle for collective struggle and resistance. The same is true when Cortez writes about figures beyond the musical and celebrity canon as well, such as in her poem about Joanne Little, a Black woman whose defense against rape while incarcerated became a rallying cry for feminist and abolitionist movements in the 1970s. In her poem “Rape,” Cortez narrates Little’s refusal to submit to a racist prison guard:

And what was Joanne Little supposed to do for / the man who declared war on her life … / This being wartime for Joanne she did what a defense department will do in / times of war / and when the piss drinking shit sniffing guard said / I’m gonna make you wish you were dead black bitch come here / Joanne came down with an ice pick in / the swat freak motherfucker’s chest

For Sapphire, who also discusses this poem in her foreword, the text marks a watershed moment for Cortez. Its force, she notes, does not lie in a simple plea to recognize the humanity of Black women or incarcerated people, but in its bare insistence on “ownership, agency, autonomy, the right to defend one’s most intimate property—the self.”

Cortez’s oeuvre, of course, exceeds the spirit of the two poems cited above: it encompasses love poems, poems about the blues, poems that push forward formal experimentation to its outermost limits, poems about the extreme violence Black people in America endure, resistance, global struggle and struggle in Africa, and poems with symbolism drawn from its continent and diasporas. “Cortez’s poems are filled with politics, love, reminders of heroes and heroines, folklore, magic, victims, and victimizers,” writes Alexis De Veaux in Essence. “She collects and retains our heritage, keeps alive memories, people, and events.”

Emphasizing the poet’s mythopoetic treatment of those around her—lives transfigured into personae—proposes a reading of the 2025 Firespitter not simply as an anthology, but also, under Sapphire’s hand, as a continuation of this very practice: a book that at once conserves Cortez’s verse and participates in the mythopoeia she performed for others. As Cortez once positioned her circle into magnitude, so the framing of Firespitter elevates her: larger than life, a poet whose convictions would not be quarantined in the private sphere but were borne, unflinching, uncompromisingly into public space, uncensored and urgent to revisit now.