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The poems in The Stone of Language explore personal events as well as events in our global consciousness, with the author’s fierce demand for social justice always prominent. New Pages calls the volume “above all…songs of the people’s struggle.”
A powerful, sustained lyrical and narrative sequence written in the midst of political and personal catastrophe (the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, a disastrous home fire, her own battle with lung cancer), Allen’s last book of poems is at once a bonfire made up of the ruins of civilization, a call for one more effort to set things right, and a gift to us all from this fertile and generous writer.
This collection of 87 poems richly reflects the experience of its author, invoking myth and history, tragedy and comedy, narrative and lyric, nightmare and the clear light of day. The poems are arranged in an intuitive fashion reflecting Allen’s passion for storytelling.
Arguably Allen’s best single poetry volume, this collection contains memorable evocations of such figures as La Malinche, Pocohontas, Sacagawea, and Molly Brant. Tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, Allen redefines the Native tradition in her poetry.
Teresa Anderson died January 9, 2006, after waging a decade-long battle against cancer. After her original cancer diagnosis in 1995, Teresa’s subject matter expanded from the land and people she loved to include her fight with the disease. Always lyrical and imbued with uncommon wisdom, her poems took on a new dignity and clarity as a result of her battle.
Sanora Babb, well-recognized author of a novel, a memoir, and several story collections, has written poetry all of her life. Her strong empathy with people and their daily lives and her ability to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary is reflected in her poems, but they also quicken to her lyricism, clarity, and sense of immediacy.
These poems reflect years of observation: checking out the street, listening to talkers, getting inside the heads of family members, and locating an aesthetic in the work of others. Maisha Baton casts a wise eye on a chaotic world where the human is sometimes obscured.
The source and setting of these poems is the city, reflecting the diversity of the lives and interests of 50 poets from over a dozen ethnic backgrounds. The poets include Robin Becker, Anna Carvalho, Susan Eisenberg, Martín Espada, Rosario Morales, and Mark Powlak. Denise Bergman, a poet living in Cambridge, conceived of this project.
Arlene Biala’s stark, tender, sensual and political poetry explores stories of the Pacific generations, particularly Filipinos, who have left their native lands to live in America. This collection goes beyond chronological storytelling into the dance of simultaneous experiences called forth by tragedy, family, and love.
Closing the Hotel Kitchen is about war and about falling apart when that is the only route left to sanity. It takes place from the 1960s to the early 1970s, from New York’s streets to Vietnam and India. Untouched by sentimentality, these poems offer a visceral look at the narrator’s attempts to find coherence within a violent world. Bohm’s poetry, displaying a capacity to listen to others’ voices and assimilate their experiences, provides glimpses of transformation.
In these poems, Broyles explores the historic oppression of Native Americans and other peoples, tracking the painful consequences and also the resilience and surviving spirit of the people themselves. Mild in manner but clear in statement, she offers a strong cure and finds cause for empathy and hope.
These poems of Abenaki heritage invoke the natural world of New England and the poet’s meditations upon it. They also explore the creatures and events Bruchac encounters during his travels, and show that he is always home, always centered, no matter where he is.
Joseph Bruchac is a disciplined writer, a serious student of nature, and a master of close observation. This collection explores many cultural concerns, especially the need to preserve a vulnerable ecology while affirming native traditions.
Olga Cabral is the author of seven volumes of poetry. Born in 1909, she moved as a child to Winnepeg, Canada, and later to New York. “Since then,” she said, “I have lived through all the wars of this century, together with the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, the cynical witch hunts of McCarthyism, the atom bomb, the Cold War—I’ve seen it all.”
The poems in This Business of Wisdom suggest a syllabus of the lessons each human faces “as you grow, persistent but clumsy, into your bones.” With sometimes playful, often pointed language, the author draws upon nature, music, dreams and current events to illustrate how to gain one’s place in the world.
Passionate and sensuous, these poems address both mind and body. The young Filipina poet proceeds with a sure understanding of the power of images to confront the instability of the world around her. Family, growth and decay, the politics of liberation are reflected with intensity.
Lisa D. Chavez, of Mestiza background, wrote most of these poems in the voices of her neighbors and townspeople in Fairbanks, Alaska. They reflect life in a harsh landscape including its passion, violence, and inevitable losses.
This book, by leading Los Angeles poet Michelle T. Clinton, is a bold exploration of powerful themes: from everyday acts of love and hate in the ghetto to gestures of political and sexual survival in a postmodern no-woman’s land.
In this epic poem, Sharon Doubiago seeks to understand America in its dual relation as a haven of hope and a site of genocide. She transforms the poetic language of Whitman in a response to the male epic consciousness of twentieth-century American poetry.
This subversive account of Columbus’s ill-omened voyage and its legacy by renowned Cherokee poet and painter Jimmie Durham has developed a lively underground reputation since it was published in 1983. From bitter to humorous, the poems in this collection are always honest.
Susan Firer has read her poems in universities, prisons, and bars and on public radio and TV around her home state of Wisconsin. These poems chronicle her family’s life—its joys and tragedies—in an engaging and humanistic manner.
Wherever she has lived, Michele Gibbs has never given up the struggle to make a better world. Line of Sight contains poetry and essays from previous works, new material, drawings, and sculpture by this champion of social change.
This is the true story of what happened when Lisa Gill threatened to hold up an MRI clinic in 2003. Using poetry, prose, and art, her memoir takes a powerful look at both personal and institutionalized violence and explores how a hard-won medical diagnosis left her searching to understand the history of violence in her life and its consequences for her health.
These interlocking stories cover the migration of J.J., his wife Naomi, and their son Otis from Tulsa to Albuquerque; second, Otis’ coming of age amid the shifting fortunes of his family and friends; and third, events occurring in other peoples’ lives at the same place and time.
Lone Dog’s Winter Count is a poetic accounting of Cherokee descendant Diane Glancy’s own life, based on the image of the pictographic calendar of the Dakota Nation. The volume was winner of the Minnesota Book Award in 1991.
“The workshop in Solentiname...demonstrates how quickly and fruitfully the children of nature can attain, however fleetingly and even in war, that state of grace we call poetry.”—Allen Josephs, N.Y. Times Book Review
Stephen Haven’s first collection of poems is both an ethnographic tour of working-class life in America and a tribute to the many small moments that weave together to form our personal histories.
Stark, militant, and searching, bearing a fierce witness, these poems may be Lance Henson’s last word to America for the foreseeable future. Henson was raised as a Southern Cheyenne and is a Native American activist and currently teaches in Germany.
These poems were written in memory of Buddy Gray, grassroots activist and co-founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, murdered a decade ago in Cincinnati.
In this novel the author, borrowing from his years in the Appalachian and African-American neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine, describes life on a wrecking crew and the battles that men at the edge of reality fight with society, each other, and their own minds.
In this tightly written poetic saga of a modern Comanche village in Oklahoma, the young narrator is surrounded by gambling thugs, drugged-out gangs, and memories of the glory days of warriors who tried to preserve the land. The tragicomic narrative mirrors a life neither easy nor forgettable.
Here from Nicaragua are the poems of the common people, written in poetry workshops created by the Sandinistas before the revolution. The book also contains an interview with Father Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture of Nicaragua, and sponsor of the workshops.
This best-selling novel by a radical woman author of the Depression explores the fate of a farm girl who moves to the “dark city” of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she struggles to survive the death of her lover, killed in a bank robbery, and give birth to her daughter, the hope of a new generation. With a new introduction by Linda Ray Pratt.
I Hear Men Talking depicts life in a rural Iowa town during the Depression. The town’s complacency in the face of the social and economic crisis of the Depression is destroyed during a revolt led by frustrated farmers.
This collection of short stories, essays and reportage allows the reader to fully appreciate Le Sueur’s shorter writings, beginning in 1926. Seven stories and memoirs written during the blacklist period between 1947 and 1958 are of particular importance.
This multi-voiced account of a bus trip from Albuquerque to Denver, passing the site of the Ludlow Massacre, is also a journey through the purgatory of American consciousness. This novella is rich in allusions to writers including Whitman, Poe, and Lawrence.
In these short journalistic pieces, Meridel Le Sueur recorded the struggle of poor women during the Depression in Minnesota. She acted not as a detached observer, but a co-participant in the women’s misery and a fighter for their survival.
This collection is loosely structured around the Chinese and Asian immigrant experience. Russell Leong’s poems begin and end with water, from the Canton Delta to the drained pool of a Los Angeles tract house in Little Saigon.
Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad and adding an American self to the many selves that the world’s myriad, bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetry captures her enormous vitality and intelligence. In this volume, Lim confronts the trials of learning to live in a new country and explores the inner life and consciousness of a woman.
This collection is an exotic, aphrodisiacal perfume wafting through the senses, thickly spiced by the dual nature of a poet whose culture and experience effortlessly blend concrete imagery with a quiet, fierce longing for a world that may only exist within memory—or verse.
Adrian C. Louis, a member of the Paiute tribe, writes of his life among the Oglala Sioux with humor, insight, and anger at oppression. A former journalist, he has edited tribal newspapers and taught on and off the reservation.
Poems from nineteen volumes, with a generous addition of new pieces, this collection contains the themes and treatments that have moved Glenna Luschei all her life: sympathetic understanding, wry judgment, the experience of sensation and of loss, the act of witness, the love of nature and its processes, and longing for peace and harmony in a world often dominated by injustice and the abuse of power.
E. A. Mares is one of the true poets of the Chicano renaissance. The Unicorn Poem has been hailed as a Chicano epic; the volume includes thirty poems.
“I have always lived deliberately.” These are the words of an exceptional poet who, in Trouble Light, has concentrated on the themes closest to his heart and mind: working-class ethnicity, family life, war and recovery from war, prisons and the prisons we create within ourselves, personal loss, and our inability to heal from certain injuries.
This volume, edited by Fred Whitehead, is a sampler of Thomas McGrath’s best short poems from the 1940s to the 1970s. It is modeled after an earlier pamphlet, Longshot O’Leary’s Book of Practical Poetry, published shortly after the Second World War.
The Mill Hunk Herald was a newsletter, a journal of opinion, a magazine of the arts—an unsanctioned rebel institution in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the decade of the 1980s. These writings about the Homestead, PA steel mill and its subsequent shutdown were lovingly culled from the remains.
This book carries a bite: the author is an Oklahoma woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary. Add the heartbreak, lustiness, wisdom, Okie determination, and Indian legacy of these poems and you have quite a bundle. The historic family photographs are breathtaking in their own right.
These plays test the borders between tragedy and comedy to show how myth and cultural history have shaped the Chicano imagination. The Hungry Woman draws from the Greek Medea and the myth of La Llorona; Heart of the Earth is a feminist revisioning of the Mayan Popul Vuh story.
These plays confront the changing California landscape of the 1990s, as anti-immigration, anti-youth, and English Only legislation impact the already impoverished farmworker towns and urban communities.
This collection of Moraga’s first three successful plays established her as a leading Chicana playwright. Ted Fishman of Chicago News and Arts Weekly called Shadow of a Man “the best kind of political work, performed with skill and sensitivity.”
This sixth volume of Niatum’s poetry expresses thirty years of endeavor. Niatum was born in Seattle and influenced by the stories of his Klallam grandfather. He is internationally recognized as a poet and anthologist.
nila northSun was born of Chippewa-Shoshone descent in Schurz, Nevada and currently lives on the Stillwater Indian Reservation in Fallon, Nevada. She has published two books of poetry and co-authored a tribal history for the Paiute-Shoshone tribe.
Departing from her mother’s Japanese name, “One Thousand Cranes,” these poems bring a message of trauma and recovery, war and reconciliation, and the passage from personal shame to self-regard. They are historical, political and personal in the same breath.
In this collection, Julie Parson-Nesbitt navigates the street-wise world of the personal; comes to terms with love and interracial marriage; and undertakes a political response to her Jewish heritage.
Stacey’s Story concerns a child custody battle told from the mother’s boyfriend’s point of view. This novella by Mexican-American/Oglala Sioux writer Robert L. Perea won an award for first novel in 1992 from Returning the Gift, an annual Native American cultural festival.
In this volume legendary poet Charles Potts explores his Idaho roots and makes his meditation on family and geographical memory come full circle. Observant, scrupulous, passionate, and courageous, he describes his life as it embraces the lives and events that came before it.
For more than forty years, Charles Potts has remained true to his origins as a relentless and radical visionary. This generous selection of poetry, fiction, and memoir represents work he has published in innumerable magazines and more than 20 books.
This was our second volume of poetry by the Los Angeles-born Chicana author. Critic Francisco Lomeli says of her work, “As a warrior of language, she aims to rupture silence and fill it with a new vitality.”
This collection by internationally celebrated poet Margaret Randall describes her battle with the Immigration Department, her awakening to the nightmare of childhood incest, her emergence as a lesbian, and her continuing support for socialism.
Internationally acclaimed socialist feminist writer Margaret Randall has centered her energy on bridging worlds and exploring women’s and cultural issues. In this volume, she uses her intimate knowledge of the Grand Canyon to reflect on geography, history, and human experience.
A native son of the Embudo Valley in northern New Mexico, Levi Romero expresses the heart of a stranger at the margins of a city—Albuquerque. His sturdy judgment, self-deprecating humor, and respect for his friends and culture give this volume fresh appeal.
Rose’s reputation strongly rests on the poems and drawings in this early volume. The poems have been praised for their sense of wholeness, their respect for the lives and cultures of their subjects, and in particular for the compassionate final section that brings together stories of oppression and genocide from around the world.
The author, who died tragically in 1988, captured the voice of his adopted family and neighbors in these bilingual stories. This collection rings with humor, insight, and wisdom, and reflects his precise ear for the Spanish of northern New Mexico.
This volume of Jim Sagel’s won the prestigious Casa de Las Americas prize for Chicano literature. In it, Sagel beautifully captures the voices of people living in Espanola and northern New Mexico.
Patricia Clark Smith, of Irish-Micmac-Canuk heritage, searches through her life history and infuses these poems with its richness. The poems reflect a number of themes, including raising two sons, her working class origins, and working in academia.
This is the first book of poems by poet and teacher Terry Song, who openly and candidly describes issues of rural life, sexuality, politics, and family.
In this volume Julia Stein grapples with the themes of her life as a working-class teacher in Los Angeles as well as a variety of natural disasters. A concluding seven-part poem celebrates her rejuvenation through her contact with the land.
Through the persona of Shulamith, “the singer of all the songs,” these poems treat the condition of Jewish women in the Bible as a prelude to the trials, misfortunes, and victories of their heroic counterparts in the twentieth century.
Lyrical and angry, No Parole Today isa collection of Laura Tohe’s poetry and prose that records her experiences with boarding school life, as well as those of her mother and grandmother. It also explores the joys and tragedies of growing up on and off the Diné (Navajo) Reservation.
The poems in The Fever of Being range in mood from comic to tragic, dealing with Luis Alberto Urrea’s life within the Hispanic and Anglo border cultures. This is the first published collection of poetry by this Chicano writer, editor and visual artist.
Truth-telling with a homespun accent, these poems reflect the poet’s raising in a logging town in Washington state. Beneath the sweetness of some language is a sense of threat, endangered sexuality, and the need to create a makeshift existence to keep promise and courage alive.
These poems reflect a variety of Waldman’s experiences, from his travels in Alaska in the 1990s to his reflection on September 11, 2001.
This selection from six volumes of poetry and translation tells the story of a hard life full of passionate commitment. Witherup’s poems explore manual labor, nature, and the loss of love.
For 20 years Nellie Wong’s small collection of poetry and fiction has survived as an underground classic. Wong is still active as a university office worker, a union member, and a radical organizer in San Francisco.
Indian Trains is about an entirely new tribe: urban mixed-bloods of multiple tribes who are respectful of where their ancestors have come from but are increasingly going to Indian powwows, Indian bars, and Urban Native organizations for cultural fulfillment rather than only returning to reservations to find out who they are.
These poems reveal the heart of a survivor. In the title section, the poet, caught in “the unspoken language of pain,” escapes his beginnings only to find that the culture of violence has followed him. The second section charts his journey to survival. In the last section, he contrasts the backbreaking manual labor of his day job with his real work, “to write/Love/Hold my children while rocking them to sleep/Children of the flesh/Children of the word.”
