You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A multicultural selection of contemporary poems by Puerto Rican and other poets who meet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.
In the centerpiece of the book, the poet offers a searing, unsentimental look at himself and his life.
"A collection of poems in a new street-born language, Nuyorican; a dynamic English-Spanish contrapunctal expression of the anger and aspirations of the Puerto Rican. English nouns function as verbs. Spanish verbs function as adjectives. Raw life needs raw verbs and nouns to express the action and to name the quality of the experience."--Jacket.
ñDonÍt believe the deadly game,î Miguel Algarin warns the elderly black Puerto Rican sitting in a park in Old San Juan, ñof Northern cities paved with gold and plenty / donÍt believe the fetching dream / of life improvement in New York / the only thing youÍll find in Boston / is a soft leather shoe up your ass.î In this affecting collection of poetry and prose, Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarin crafts beautifully angry, sad pieces about injustice and loss. While warning his compatriots about the unreality of the American Dream, he acknowledges that ñwe are the pistons that / move the roughage through Uncle / SamÍs intestines, we keep the flow / of New York happening / we are its muscles...
None
For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world--the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency--and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
The Nuyorican Poets Café has for the past forty years provided a space for multicultural artistic expression and a platform for the articulation of Puerto Rican and black cultural politics. The Café’s performances—poetry, music, hip hop, comedy, and drama—have been studied in detail, but until now, little attention has been paid to the voices of its women artists. Through archival research and interview, Nuyorican Feminist Performance examines the contributions of 1970s and ’80s performeras and how they challenged the Café’s gender politics. It also looks at recent artists who have built on that foundation with hip hop performances that speak to contemporary audiences. The book spotlights the work of foundational artists such as Sandra María Esteves, Martita Morales, Luz Rodríguez, and Amina Muñoz, before turning to contemporary artists La Bruja, Mariposa, Aya de León, and Nilaja Sun, who infuse their poetry and solo pieces with both Nuyorican and hip hop aesthetics.
"My Moms was a good person. She cared, but she just couldn't hack us no more. She kept saying she gonna kill herself, too. The day she died, she told me that my father hit her, and I told her, That was good for you, for not cooking for him. And she left. I didn't know she took the pills, though. The next day, they told me she was dead."--Pistol This searing portrait of inner-city life takes us inside one of America's deadly urban battlefronts--the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Alphabet City on New York's Lower East Side. With unnerving clarity, Geoffrey Biddle shows us the people who live there, summoning their spirit against the brutalizing conditions of poverty, joblessness, drugs, crime, a...
From New York to Nashville, Boston to L.A., a bohemian rhapsody of rap swagger is spreading across the land. As the New York Observer writes: "The poetry corpse is stirring," its beating heart is "a big, dark, brick-walled loft on Third Street and Avenue C called the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. It's democratic, multicultural . . . sometimes funny, sometimes ribald. It has the vitality of vulgarity." So welcome to the inside of the explosion. We are, as Bob Holman declaims, "at the house for the tradition that has no home but your ear." Miguel Algarin, one of the Cafe's founders, knows there's an urgency among us: "We must listen to one another. We must respect one another's habits. And we must share the truth and integrity that the voice of the poet so generously provides." So here they are - everyone from founding poets Miguel Pinero, Ntozake Shange, and Piri Thomas to Maggie Estep, Nicole Breedlove, Mike Tyler, Reg E. Gaines, Edwin Torres, Paul Beatty, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and a hundred others. The publisher of Robert Frost is happy to proclaim that the poetry franchise has come back to the people.
None