Houston A. Baker, Jr.,
Passing Over
ISBN: 0-916418-87-1
47 pgs. (paper) $9.00
This collection, born of the traumatic rape of the author's wife during a home burglary, depicts the difficult but triumphant journey to healing and normalcy. These poems are an offering of love.
"This book is indeed a gift, both to the specific person to whom it is tenderly offered and to all of us readers who need or will need its heroic spirit."
Arnold Rampersad
"Passing Over embraces the personal and political, and it is the emotional trajectory of each poem that pierces our modern armor."
Yusef Komunyakaa
"Charting a journey through despair and back to love, Houston Baker proves the grace of poetry."
Toi Derricotte
"Some of the poems are still wet on the page, a combination of blood and tears. Baker writes following the season of winter and the scarification of his soul. This book is a gift of hope, a ceremony reaching out to the living."
E. Ethelbert Miller
CONVERSION
Winner of the 2007 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award
ISBN: 978-0-916418-98-4
83 pages (paper) $18.00
"With
this book Remica Bingham joins the list of poets we have hoped for. She
sees with a brave eye and hears the music of all our languages,
validating each. Her story is
the human story; her sharing it is an act
of great generosity."
Lucille Clifton
"One has the feeling reading Remica Bingham's book that one in encountering a poet committed to making a career of this business. Her assured voice makes us imagine that she came to poetry fully formed and singing lustily such that it belies the achievement of this first book of risky, spiritual poems that can only enrich the poetic landscape. As we celebrate this new book, it is hard not to anticipate the riches to come from her pen. A most welcome debut."
Kwame Dawes
"The many voices Remica Bingham created so gracefully and so artfully are utterly convincing, moving and life enhancing. She has the gift, and Convention is one of the most readable and remarkable first books of poetry I've come across in years."
Ed Ochester
"In Conversion, Remica Bingham charts a path that begins in the dailyness of our lives -- our loves and losses crosses the territory of human kindness and cruelty, and ends in a kind of salvation. These poems hover at the intersection of memory and history... in a voice both tender and humane."
Natasha Trethewey
The Dropped Hand
ISBN:
978-0-9797509-4-682 pages (paper) $15.00
"Death gains
on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its
emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of
playing cards: 'abrupt and final/silence.' If that were all, the bravery
of the poet would
be
much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful
antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she
crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry's dream to do
just that."
-Linda Gregerson
"I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for 'something bursting with spring and belief.' Through the poems in The Dropped Hand, she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places
it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along."-Jim Daniels
"In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal. This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk's finest and most moving collection."
-Naomi Long Madgett
Chronicles of the Pig & Others Delusions
Winner of the 2010 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award
ISBN: 978-0-9797509-2-2
77 pgs. $18.00
Chronicles of the Pig & Other Delusions is a linguistic alchemy in which Edward Bruce Bynum blends the historical, the mystical, and
the psychological with infinite quests, legend, and lyricism to not only conjure the prophecy of swans above a brilliant lake, but also leave the taste of real gold in ones mouth.
Claude Wilkinson
A distinctly different music. Give it time, and it will captivate you. Without question, Edward Bynum is destined to be, as John Oliver Killens might say, one of our long-distance runners. There is a certain irresistibility here . . . .
Mari Evans
If ever a poet needs to be read, studied, appreciated and shared, it is Edward Bruce Bynum. He is of and ahead of his time . . . . He has found his own highly distinctive and heart-stopping territory. Quiet, thoughtful, a questioner of multiple worlds not ready for the easy answers. . . . A word-worker seeking truth beyond the common . . . .
Haki R. Madhubuti
Sheila Carter-Jones
Three Birds Deep
Winner of the 2012 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award
ISBN: 978-0-9797509-5-3
85 pages (paper) $18.00
Three Birds Deep by Sheila Carter-Jones is a stunning book of
risk, movement, and deep feeling. With wild, leaping detail and
surprising connections, she catapults the reader into the visceral world
where the whole body lives. This is not the poetry of the floating voice
or the afternoon tea; this is brave, significant work that asks what all
good poetry should ask of the reader: it requires us to feel.
Our
humanity is summoned in poem after poem.
Jan Beatty, poet
Three Birds Deep packs a wallop. Sheila Carter-Jones is sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued and possesses a deep, deep heart. These poems have their eyes on the world and the word, and the lightning-quick imagery and thunderous rhythm of the lines combine from poem to poem to create a truly memorable collection.
Jim Daniels, poet
Carter-Jones writes poetry with an outward calm, but there is turbulent knowledge of the present and a brilliant view of the future. Each poem is highly imagined and has an affection for story that is alive with truth and remembered feelings. Hers is a moral voice with music that speaks through words and an underworld of passion that changes us in the reading. This is an exciting voice to be reckoned with.
Grace Cavlieri,
The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
Creole Journal: The Louisiana Poems
ISBN: 0-916418-84-7
85 pages $12.00
Sybil Kein is a New Orleans Creole poet, playwright, scholar, and musician whose 1981 collection of poems, Gombo People, represents the first contribution to American letters of original literature in the Louisiana Creole language. Additional poetry includes Delta Dancer (Lotus Press) and An American South (Michigan State University Press). Creole Journal is a reprint of the latter collection.
Kein has also recorded songs on casette and compact disks, including Serenade Creole, Maw-maw's Creole Lullabye and Other Songs for Children, and Creole Ballads & Zydeco, the last of which includes sixteen Creole slave songs never before published.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Desdemona's Fire
Winner of the 1999 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award
ISBN: 0-916418-83-9
61 pgs. (paper) $12.00
While miscegenation has always been more a part of American history than
many want to admit, these poems journey through this often forbidden
landscape in poems that are sometimes painfully poignant, yet rich and
fresh in their imagery and detail and finely crafted.
"At the heart of these stunning poems is a precise and imaginative examination of the thin line that separates beauty and terror, wisdom and madness, tolerance and hatred."
Bruce Weigl
"... the classical argument, the channeled mind stream, has a unique surface property; it brings commerce to two cultures. Here, argument becomes sublime and here the poet is truly a carrier of ladders and I think, as the Old Testament author intended, a carrier of ladders has the horizontal strength of the earth almost for a perfect burden."
Norman Dubie
JONESTOWN: A VEXATION
Winner of the
2011 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry
Award
ISBN:
978-0-9797509-3-9
83 pages (paper) $18.00
"Voyages in an Intellectual Territory, much like any Space Trip to the Heavens or Ocean Voyage beneath the seas, take courage, fortitude. patience and perhaps a bit of luck in finding the right questions at the right times-Loaves and fishes for some; two days food and water supply for others; vexations of the how and why kind. Human questions of the greatest dimensions asking how can we be, how can we stay: strong; human. For two thousand years we have troubled our spirits to define the Man from Galilee; for
over two months the world cheered 33 miners. And Carmen Gillespie has turned her hand and mind to the puzzle of Jonestown. What a triumph! A great mind exploring a great complexity. And aren't we all the better for her journey? And isn't this a journey we all need to understand. The elements are there to help uncover mysteries of the Human Spirit. JONESTOWN: A VEXATION is a much needed book."Nikki Giovanni
Poet
Poet