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Winner of the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize “A powerful work of lyric art.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.
This groundbreaking, transgenre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/
"Forgive state poet #289-128 / for not scribbling illusions / of trickery as if timeless hell / could be captured by stanzas / alliteration or slant rhyme," remarks the speaker, Maryland Department of Corrections prisoner {#289-128}, early in this haunting collection. Three sections—{#289-128} Property of the State, {#289-128} Poet-in-Residence (Cell 23), and {#289-128} Poet in New York—frame the countless ways in which the narrator's body and life are socially and legally rendered by the state even as the act of poetry helps him reclaim an identity during imprisonment. These poems address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell. In the tradition of Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Etheridge Knight's The Essential Etheridge Knight, {#289-128} challenges the language of incarceration—especially the ways in which it reinforces stigmas and stereotypes. Though {#289-128} refuses to be defined as a felon, this collection viscerally details the dehumanizing effects of prison, which linger long after release. It also illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man's life At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a "certifiable" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts's years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts's survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.
Her Read: A Graphic Poem is a hybrid text at once poetry and visual art. In the tradition of reusing canvases, Steinorth takes a seminal text, The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read and with the liberal use of correction fluid, scalpel and embroidery floss, transforms the book from art criticism into feminist verse. Though the maternal body appears with frequency in Read’s illustrated text which spans from prehistory to the modern age, he includes zero female artists. Her Read: A Graphic Poem is an excavation of buried voices, a reclamation of bodies framed in gilt and an homage to those whose arts remain unsung.
Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom. Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.
A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.
"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall
Poetry from beloved lead guitarist of the multi-platinum record selling legendary band Triumph Reinvention is a largely autobiographical collection of poetry — a project that followed on the heels of Rik Emmett retiring from a touring musician’s and college educator’s life in early 2019. Inside all of the slashes that define him — singer/songwriter/guitarist/rock star/teacher/columnist — writing has always been his strongest avocation, and the poetic style of “Ultra Talk,” in particular, offered a welcome spark for a songwriter’s freedom of expression. This creative license is organized under seven headings – The Humanities, Life & Death, There’s Politics in Everything, Double Helix, Soapbox Sermonettes, Time Time Time, and Ars Nova 2020. Rik’s poetry (literally) reinvents his own retirement, and it’s not just some aging dilettante’s bucket list fancy. He discovered a sincere way to tie up a lot of loose ends, fulfill dormant promise, and eschew show biz tangents. Reinvention, his first book, makes some sense of a life that always went in a lot of different directions at once. Finally, he’s given himself permission to chase a mode of self-expression with less commercial potential … than jazz guitar recordings.
"Bob Kaufman's life is written on mirrors in smoke."--Jack Kerouac "So much did he embody a French tradition of the poet as outsider, madman, and outcast, that in France, Kaufman was called the Black Rimbaud."--David Henderson "He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti TheCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman brings together every known surviving poem by this major African-American surrealist, including the three books published in his lifetime,Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness,Golden Sardine, andThe Ancient Rain. With over 30 previously uncollected works,Collected Poems is the first comprehensive presentation of this truly original, streetwise autodidact and member of the Beat Generation. Included here are a foreword by devorah major, reminiscences by editors Raymond Foye and Neeli Cherkovski, and a biographical timeline by editor Tate Swindell, which chronicles this elusive poet's movements across the country and around the world.Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement and marks Kaufman's welcome return to City Lights Publishers. Praise forCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman: "With this magnetic new unveiling Bob Kaufman trenchantly sunders endemic retrocausal error and neglect that his casted his fate into a secondary enclave of lesser mastery. To set the story straight it was his spirit that helped sire the Ginsberg that we know and not vice versa. It was he who magically hoisted the invisible umbrella under which Kerouac and others such as Corso were enabled to protractedly flourish. Arrested 39 times for poetic brilliance via bravura he was the absolute contrary of the sterile academic scrounging for golden verbal eggs. Never concerned with immediate notoriety he passed across unerring emptiness as a poetic lahar sweeping in all directions at once. He volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'"--Will Alexander "Bob Kaufman is one our most vulnerable, mysterious and beautiful of poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power. What does it take to be such a poet-man, veils/layers of existence laced with hardship, suffering? Not many like this anymore. The Black American Rimbaud, as he was christened in France. His poems make me weep and bow with humility and wonder. I last saw him, shape-shifting shaman on Ken Kesey's stage in Oregon, swirling in a torque of rage, enlightenment, and prescience. Pure product of America's madness: fury and tenderness. The writing is complex and lays its soul baring down on jazz inflected syllables and riffs for all to read and tremble within. No serious canon is complete without this insistent rhythm, poetic acuity, and a body's last resort to sing."--Anne Waldman "Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future's light is the mission of theCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This poet's poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."--Kamau Daaood