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
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
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