Saul Williams has accomplished a lot in his career, in many different facets, whether it be as an actor, musician, or writer. Because of the cache he’s built up with his other work, he’s been able to reach a wider and younger audience with poetry than most others are able to. With his latest project, he teamed up with fellow actor/poet Dufflyn Lammers and editor Aja Monet, and created a way to gain exposure for a great number of poets.

Chorus is given the subtitle A Literary Mixtape, the idea being that instead of creating a traditional anthology of poetry, where pieces are presented formally by author and spaced out so that they can be analyzed individually, a free flowing compilation could be put together without author and title boldly separating each poem. This allows ideas and emotions to connect one poem to the next. In some ways it seems bold and daring, but also seems so obvious you wonder why this hasn’t been done a million times before. Williams and Lammers and Monet have assembled a interesting and diverse group of voices, and by configuring the book in this fashion, it allows us to let our guard down as we read, as the ideas and emotions blend together and converse with each other in your head as you’re reading multiple poems from different authors. This stands in opposition to the way in which most of us learn to read poetry, which is in school, where we are taught to read a poem individually, analyze form and elements, and then extrapolate it’s meaning. And then people wonder why most of the population isn’t excited to read poetry? As you go through the pages of Chorus, voices will shift in gender, religion, ethnic background, and so forth, and tones and styles will shift as well, but what becomes clear throughout the book is the lesson that my seventh grade Texas History teacher always tried to emphasize to us - “There are more similarities than differences.” Some voices are angry, some are loving, some are confused and trying to make sense of their situation, some are afraid, some are confident, but this all just adds up to the human experience, and therein lies the beauty of Chorus.

Chorus is really just a simple twist on the modern anthology of poetry, but it’s a very effective one, and Williams and Lammers and Monet have constructed it quite well. It forces you to digest the content first, and then think about any outside factors second. It will expose you to close to a hundred voices, the majority of which most readers won’t already be familiar with, and you’ll see how they all fit together to express their time and place in this world. That’s a beautiful thing.