"Once again, with Brick City Vanguard, James Smethurst proves that he is one of the leading scholars of the Black Arts Movement, of New Left literary studies, and of one of its emblematic writers, Amiri Baraka."-Jean-Philippe Marcoux, cofounder of the Amiri Baraka Society and author of Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem
"James Smethurst has read everything on Baraka and produced an original and important book. Brick City Vanguard is a major contribution to the field."-William J. Harris, author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic
"An illuminating work about a central figure in the Black Arts Movement."-CHOICE
"[A] generous and generative work that positions Baraka as a listener and singer/vocalizer as well as a reader and writer. Smethurst invites us to think about Baraka's intellectual production with and about music as a sustained engagement with Marxist thought . . . Brick City Vanguard gestures toward exciting articulations of Black studies and cultural studies."-American Literary History
"Brick City Vanguard equips readers to take seriously, at long last, the entire career of a major writer-activist, one whose abiding concerns remain before us today."-African American Review
"Through a critical reassessment of the way Amiri Baraka came to understand and perform Black art while reflecting the diversity of its social and political thought, Smethurst offers a novel approach to reinterpreting Baraka's cultural legacy."-Journal of African American History
