Hard Facts is a self-consciously communist poetry book, right down to the red cover with the silhouettes of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao on the back. Baraka's consciousness is committed to class struggle and his poetics is materialist, but it too often falls short of dialectics…. [There] is the bad mouthing of the phonies with a hot stream of scream-of-consciousness hip talk mixed with revolutionary exhortations. All of which breaks our ear rather than sings to our needs. An atheist preacher is still a preacher, and one wonders how much respect for the multinational masses is really there. I'm reminded of a line from Baraka's earlier Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note: "Nobody sings anymore."

Song is what's missing from Baraka's list of what the people need from poets.

Wedged in between the revolutionary rhetoric there are a couple of poems that let you know Baraka is still a major poetic voice. (p. 115)

A problem for political poetry is that of achieving an abstract statement raised up from the materials and linked dialectically with the content. A political poet runs the risk of assertion. Baraka's assertion has the fierce intensity characteristic of left-wing sectarian attitudes. (p. 116)