WhileWrestling with the Muse is clearly an homage [to Dudley Randall], it doesn't slip into sentimentality or fluff. Detroit Free Press As his one-time assistant editor and literary executor, poet and professor Melba Joyce Boyd is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Detroit's late poet laureate. Detroit Metro Times This is an imaginative work illuminating the life and influence ... Read moreof African American poet and publisher Dudley Randall.
Anne Martino The Ann Arbor News Boyd has penned this definitive biography and celebration of [Randall's] poetry. College and Research Libraries News Boyd celebrates the life and times of African-American poet Dudley Randall in Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press... Boyd's sensitive portrait introduces us to a colleague many of us never had the opportunity to know. American Libraries [Wrestling with the Muse]... is a memoir within a memoir capturing not only the life of Randall, one of the greatest success stories in American small press history, but also the history of a turbulent century rife with racial injustice and discrimination. Ebony Magazine Boyd provides an intimate and critical examination...along with a valuable study of many of the personal, politcal, and institutional bases of mid-20th-century African American Poetry...Highly recommended. Choice her book is an engaging and important contribution. taking its place alongside the autobiographies of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka and too few others
W. Kim Heron Metro Times Detroit Muse integrates aesthetics and politics with the vividness of an eyewitness and the conscience of a good journalist.
Kim D. Hunter Against the Current This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in American intellectual and cultural history during the second half of the twentieth century, as it recalls the work of an accomplished poet largely missing from contemporary anthologies and convincingly recounts the development and impact of a crucial cultural institution of the black arts-black power era.
James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Journal of American History A serious, delightful and unpredictable exursion into the vibrant and volatile social life of Detroit.
Jonathan Scott Race and Class Show Less