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Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is a poetry memoir that takes up the intersections of Indigeneity, Blackness, queerness and migration as it relates to U.S. federal immigration law. The book pushes the boundaries of an "undocumented immigrant narrative"via the poet's refusal to belong to United Statian society and the refusal of a structured poetics.In fact, the chaotic geographies of the manuscript (collages + photographs + emails + negative space) formulate theories of fugitivity that position the transAtlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. In this refusal of national belonging and form, the book asks for a critical kinship that the law can never account for, and thus, Pelaez Lopez negotiates legal status for new imaginaries of care. As a whole, the manuscript asks: "what does it mean that a descendant of enslaved Africans becomes an illegal alien in the same continent that subjugated their ancestors to chattel slavery?" Furthermore, "can an Indigenous subject of this continent be considered 'illegal' in the continent of their ancestors?"
Contemporary artists revisit Warhol's 1985 love letter to America Originally published in 1985, Warhol's Americafeatures photographs both taken and collected by the artist during his cross-country travels and in-person encounters over the previous decade. The book, an idiosyncratic love letter to America, finds Warhol reflecting on everything from travel, beauty and fame to politics, technology and the American Dream. Three decades later, Fantasy Americainvites artists Nona Faustine, Kambui Olujimi, Pacifico Silano, Naama Tsabar and Chloe Wise to revisit this seminal publication and contribute their own art. All New York-based, they, like Warhol, are cross-disciplinary artists drawn to repetition, seriality and image appropriation in their work. Against the backdrop of nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, these essays and artworks probe and challenge our perceptions of what America is and what it can become.
We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author's childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building. As Brown searches for other Black kin in the same spaces through which she moves, her experiences of Blackness are placed in conversation with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. Esteban Dorantes, Gaspar Yanga, and the author's Black family members and friends populate the book as a protective and guiding force, building the "we" evoked in the title and linking Brown to all other African-descended peoples living in what Saidiya Hartman calls "the afterlife of slavery."
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Classroom guide and introduction written by author inside. An elegy and a celebration, TO LOVE AND MOURN IN THE AGE OF DISPLACEMENT by Alan Pelaez Lopez is an attempt to "make a / world anew" via the conjuring properties of poetry. Alan Pelaez Lopez reflects on what it means to embody a multidimensional existence as Black and Indigenous in an empire committed to maintain the global circuit of anti-Blackness paired with settler violence. By mediating death, fragmented romantic encounters, and the news, the collection insists/argues/declares that those who have survived (/are surviving) structural violence "create abundance where [one] thought there was none." In such declaration, the poet refuses a single-story of violence in order to make space for an AfroIndigenous future rooted in kinship and mourning practices.
Documenting the Barrio's first national survey of Latinx art, featuring more than 40 artists from the US and Puerto Rico This publication features the work of the 42 participating artists and collectives included in the highly anticipated titular exhibition organized by El Museo del Barrio in New York. The result of two years of research, this project is the museum's first nationwide exhibition and publication exploring the diverse landscape of contemporary Latinx artists working in the United States and Puerto Rico. The volume includes an essay by the curators, a conversation between some of the artists conducted by artist Elia Alba as part of her Supper Club series and illustrated, individual short interviews with the participants. A closing anthology brings together poems and excerpts of essays by Lourdes Alberto, Ariana Brown, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Deborah Cullen, Carolina Ponce de León, Esteban Jefferson, Ed Morales, Alan Pelaez Lopez, Dixa Ramírez d'Oleo, Rose Salseda and Adriana Zavala.
“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and d...
Eric A. Stanley examines the forms of violence levied against trans/queer and gender nonconforming people in the United States and shows how, despite the advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past, forms of anti-trans/queer violence is central to liberal democracy and state power.
fist of wind is a lyrical testimony that centers the Black body as a site of healing and transformation. This collection of poetry explores the lived experience of menstruation marked by pain and the liminal existence of Black folk as magical and mortal. fist of wind draws from magical realism to ask: If pain is information, what does individual and collective Black pain tell us about our world and about ourselves? How do we embody healing in this lifetime and beyond?
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry • Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
Mela is a collection of poetry told as a tale unpacking magic, love, culture, and healing.