A valuable reassessment of African-American cultural history, Black Chant traces the embrace and transformation of black modernisms and postmodernisms by African-American poets in the decades after World War II. Centering on groups of avant-garde poets such as the Howard/Dasein poets, the Freelance group, the Umbra group, and others, Nielsen attends to those poets whose radical forms of new writing formed the basis for much of what followed in the Black Arts period. As well, he undertakes a critical rediscovery of recordings by the poets Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, and Elouise Loftin, who worked with jazz composers and performers on compositions that combined post-Bop jazz with postmodern verse forms.