First Light and Other Poems

Born in 1960 in Newark, New Jersey, Roberts Counts grew up poor in the projects. Incarcerated at twenty, he began to read everything he could find from Shakespeare and Malcolm X to Einstein and Robert Frost. Gradually, he taught himself to write poetry. His poems, signed Ishmael Shamsid-din-as he was known for almost thirty years-deal with ghetto violence, the goodness and beauty of nature, and love as a source of redemption. With wit and lyric energy, Counts shows us what it takes to resist bitterness and nurture hope. "These are poems of struggle: with language, in the first instance; with the mechanisms that spin the universe; with the gods and goddesses of love; but most of all with a recalcitrant self which refuses worn and easy paths." -Paul Lauter, Editor, The Heath Anthology of American Literature