The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movements inspired her early poetry that was collected in "Black Feeling, Black Talk" (1968), which sold over ten thousand copies in its first year, in "Black Judgement" (1968), selling six thousand copies in three months, and in "Re: Creation" (1970). All three of these early works aided in establishing Giovanni as a new voice for African Americans.(30) In ""After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement", Cheryl Clarke cites Giovanni as a woman poet who became a significant part of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. Giovanni is commonly praised as one of the best African-American poets emerging from the 1960s Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Her early poems that were collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s are seen as radical as and more militant than her later work. Her poetry is described as being "politically, spiritually, and socially aware". Evie Shockley describes Giovanni as "epitomizing the defiant, unapologetically political, unabashedly Afrocentric, BAM ethos". Her work is described as conveying "urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, solidarity." Likewise, Giovanni’s early work has been considered to be “polemic,” and “incendiary.” Examples of poems in which she vehemently advocated for change include “The True Import of Present Dialogue Black vs. Negro” (1968), “Poem for Black Boys” (1968) and “A Litany for Peppe” (1970).