Of the good poems in Poems from Prison , the one which has been most lauded and most frequently anthologized is "The Idea of Ancestry," sometimes called one of the best poems that has been written about the Afro-American conception of family history and human interconnection. In this poem, Knight used what came to be his trademark in punctuation, the slash mark, along with commas, colons, occasional unusual spellings, and spacing of words to indicate how the voice should sound saying the lines. He also found a particularly effective combination of the vocabulary of the drug culture, of black slang, and of concrete images to make the idea of ancestry come alive. The reader can see the speaker staring at the forty-seven pictures of his family members pasted on his prison wall and trace the details of the speaker's remembered connections with them. Equally, the reader is, like the speaker, brought up short during the warm, flowing intermingling of lives by the "gray stone wall," one of those stark, concrete, and vigorous images which Knight creates, that, like the speaker's drug addiction, separates the speaker from those he loves and to whom he is connected. A powerfully complex experience of the essential loneliness and relatedness of a man who is at once "all of them," but different from them, and having "no children to float in the space between" is created through the structure and language of the poem.