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These are poems of positions and relationships, shifting angles on received wisdom or cultural cliché, fiercely signifying in an age of raging information and vicious exploitation. For Patricia Spears Jones, subjectivity is a challenge and a bugaboo. "Who wants to know your stuff unless Subject (Black and Female) is violated and/or perseveres against all odds?" asks Spears Jones. She tackles grand issues like racism and sexism, but with an intimate poet's eye to details, moments, miracles, pains, and the wildness of the moon and stillness of water. History and the visual serve as analogs for this collection, tying together a diverse group of poems written about the paintings and statuary in...
Patricia Spears Jones's work sings with the vibrancy and intensity of a blues singer.
Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us. In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, Jackson Poetry Prize winner Patricia Spears Jones interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal. From lyric to elegy, far-reaching poems use word play and metaphor to create richly textured landscapes in search of community. As we traverse delis, laundromats, and the Brooklyn block where morning glories grow “leaves plump as Italian cookies,” poems about poverty, art, and community, become poems about location...
"Patricia Spears Jones's tough, tender poems deploy a hard-won clarity of attention that challenges conventions public and private. They sing the complexities of our time and condition with acute, often heart-breaking candor and wit, and are built to be returned to, for beauty and for use inside the details of daily, unfiltered living."--Anselm Berrigan, author of "Free Cell" and "Some Notes on My Programming."
This stunning work illuminates today’s black experience through the voices of our most transformative and powerful African American poets. Included in this extraordinary volume are the poems of 43 of America’s most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other luminaries such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. Included are poems such as “No Wound of Exit” by Patricia Smith, “We Are Not Responsible” by Harryette Mullen, and “Poem for My Father” by Quincy Troupe. Each is accompanied by a photograph of the poet along with a first...
'A beautiful and important book' The Times On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens's life changes irrevocably. With her keen intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blurred into the background and now at the age of eight she is uprooted from her family to begin a new life with a new master. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck. Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutally unforgiving landscape of North America in the seventeenth century. ‘Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known’ Tayari Jones, New York Times BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Evocative imagery that leaps from the page with the force of gunfire. "Poems like stars in a constellation: each glowing point connects in a pattern charting lives full of love and disappointment, injustice and defeat, joy and resilience."--Library Journal "Vibrant with the intensity of blues singers."--Feminist Bookstore News
From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much li...
Joanna Fuhrman's sixth poetry collection is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. "Fuhrman's got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see 'Adjunct Commuter' poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry's plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language's complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over! " -Martine Bellen
No Jewels is the first book from poet, singer & creative director Tai Allen. The chapbook narrates a young life that was loved well, loved wrong and, sometimes, not loved at all. Sadly, this tale is not an aberration or an oddity. There are numerous #NoJewels scenarios in every locale; and, there you find false-love victims who encounter abuse & control. This book of lines, devices, spaces, forms and stanzas hopes to serve them all. The poems speaks of both the deeds and the emergence from them, with admirable self-love to preserve sanity and soul. Ambitious but possible. Purchase the book but do not forget the soundtrack -- Amazon, Apple, Tidal, Bandcamp, Spotify and taiallen.com. The companion is not a reading of the poems over music but an album of soul music inspired by the poems -- songs of revelation and emergence. Tunes that make you dance, nod your head or allow you space to just be.