Most of My Heroes Don’t Appear on No Stamps: Kwansabas

The poems in Ran Walker’s collection use an African-American poetic form called the Kwansaba, which was created in 1995 by Dr. Eugene Redmond. The poems follow a seven-line, seven-words per line pattern with no word more than seven letters (save proper nouns and foreign terms). All language within the form speaks to aspects of African-American history and culture.

With these forty-nine poems, each chapter of forty-nine lines, Walker offers profound commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from interrogations of celebrity culture to issues that speak directly to the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of My Heroes Don’t Appear on No Stamps offers readers a chance to engage with these subjects in a fresh new way while embracing a vibrant poetic form not often explored.