Book excerpt: Something Old, Something New, Nothing Borrowed Don’t Have the Blues is a timely poetry anthology that traces the history of portions of our culture and paints a portrait of rural black history over decades. With excerpts of life, truth, reality, and the social stigmas of Chicago’s ghettos, lifestyles, and how total devastation by drugs, race, and modern enslavement while battling history, integrity, and the historical economic growth and development of black America. A piece of the past, a piece of the present, a piece of the future, but above all, a sense of peace in sharing the pages of an anthology that relates to so many in so many diverse and positive ways. Neither blue nor dejected, Something Old, Something New, Nothing Borrowed Don’t Have the Blues is a now-time creation with historical value and will take even that part of non-black Americans to a place where so many truths can be seen and the passion of history development from third-world existence to great leadership can be worldly recognized.