Search results for ""City Lights Books""

Is it possible to create a borderless world? How might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies threatening our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision—and work toward—a bold new reality."Todd Miller cuts through the facile media myths and escapes the paralyzing constraints of a political 'debate' that functions mainly to obscure the unconscionable inequalities that borders everywhere secure. In its soulfulness, its profound moral imagination, and its vision of radical solidarity, Todd Miller’s work is as indispensable as the love that so palpably guides it."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time"The stories of the humble people of the earth Miller documents ask us to also tear down the walls in our hearts and in our heads. What proliferates in the absence of these walls and in spite of them, Miller writes, is the natural state of things centered on kindness and compassion."—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous ResistanceBy the time Todd Miller spots him, Juan Carlos has been wandering alone in a remote border region for days. Parched, hungry and disoriented, he approaches and asks for a ride. Miller's instinct is to oblige, but he hesitates: Furthering an unauthorized person’s entrance into the U.S. is a federal crime.Todd Miller has been reporting from international border zones for over twenty-five years. In Build Bridges, Not Walls, he invites readers to join him on a journey that begins with the most basic of questions: What happens to our collective humanity when the impulse to help one another is criminalized?A series of encounters—with climate refugees, members of indigenous communities, border authorities, modern-day abolitionists, scholars, visionaries, and the shape-shifting imagination of his four-year-old son—provoke a series of reflections on the ways in which nation-states create the problems that drive immigration, and how the abolition of borders could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all.Is it possible to imagine a borderless world? How could it emerge, and how might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies that threaten our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision—and work toward—a bold new reality.Praise for Build Bridges, Not Walls:"Todd Miller’s deeply reported, empathetic writing on the American border is some of the most essential journalism being done today. As this book reveals, the militarization of our border is a simmering crisis that harms vulnerable people every day. It’s impossible to read his work without coming away changed."—Adam Conover, creator and host of Adam Ruins Everything and host of Factually!"All of Todd Miller's work is essential reading, but Build Bridges, Not Walls is his most compelling, insightful work yet."—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crises (And the Next)"Miller calls us to see how borders subject millions of people to violence, dehumanization, and early death. More importantly, he highlights the urgent necessity to abolish not only borders, but the nation-state itself."—A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II"Todd Miller not only makes the case for tearing down the walls of Fortress America, but also for the future of the planet and humanity. The stories of the humble people of the earth he documents ask us to also tear down the walls in our hearts and in our heads. What proliferates in the absence of these walls and in spite of them, Miller writes, is the natural state of things centered on kindness and compassion."—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance"Miller lays bare the senselessness and soullessness of the nation-state and its borders and border walls, and reimagines, in their place, a complete and total restoration, therefore redemption, of who we are, and of who we are in desperate need of becoming."—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall"Miller's latest book is a personal, wide-ranging, and impassioned call for abolishing borders."—John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond"Through careful reporting and vivid personal experience, Miller illuminates the immediate need to bring people closer in an era of dehumanizing violence that is at the heart of U.S. political discourse and institutions and which has become painfully condensed in the Trump years."—Oswaldo Zavala, journalist and professor of Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York and author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking and Culture in Mexico

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Funeral Diva is the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry!A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art."Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review"She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."—Hilton Als"This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric"There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely — though not entirely — about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."—Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed"OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY"Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."—Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of BooksIn this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears—like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde—whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape.Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities."Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."—Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse" . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."—Donna Seaman, Booklist"Pamela Sneed's Funeral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."—Tommy Pico, author of Feed"Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."—Karen Finley, author of Shock Treatment"Reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami, Pamela Sneed’s memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy"Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

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FINALIST - CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYAward-winning poet explores new formal terrain in seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment.The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.Praise for Little Hill:"In Little Hill Alli Warren’s principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one … I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it’s unsparing. Still, it’s a gift."—Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction"The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work,' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!"—CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death"Reading Alli Warren’s Little Hill, I find it incredible that amidst the relentless circulation of capital and commodities—and despite attempts to make all life yield to the logics of extraction, work, accumulation, and the entrepreneurial self—a remainder is created, that of poetry. Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism—the litany does not end there. 'I saw the death of the earth in a child’s toy,' she writes. Everywhere the speaker looks there is 'congealed shit, sometimes on sale.' Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised—the question of what it means to love in times of terror."—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism

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Recommended by the New York Times and NBC News, and called one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed! The New York Times directs readers to Retablos if you want to know "what's life really like on the Mexican border." "Solis grew up just a mile from the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, and he tells stories about his childhood and coming of age, including his parents migration to the United States from Mexico, his first encounter with racism and finding a Mexican migrant girl hiding in the cotton fields."—Concepción de León, New York Times Seminal moments, rites of passage, crystalline vignettes—a memoir about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border. More praise for Octavio Solis's Retablos: "This is American and Mexican literature a stone's throw from the always hustling El Paso border."—Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin "We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictions--and he is a master at it."—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents " … it's hard not to consider the border itself as a representation of a 'terrible rift,' a split between homes, communities, identities, generations. While reading this generous and eye-opening account, it's easy to see how, for the country at large, the rift has only deepened.”—Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed Best Books of Fall 2018 "Landing somewhere between Neil Gaiman and Juan Rulfo, Solis secularizes the mythological by turning men and women into saintly figures—like their criada [maid], Consuelo, and a white priest who shows his family empathy—and monsters: border agents who take his friends away and school bullies."—Michael Adam Carroll, The Millions "There has never been a border book like Retablos, a collection of smoldering epiphanies suffering the baptizing waters of recall. . . ."—Roberto Ontiveros, San Antonio Current "The book is rendered in tight, stand-alone recollections rich with poetry and honesty. . . . If retablos are offerings, then Solis' book is a gift of memory, not always pleasant, but always true."—Beatriz Terrazas, Dallas Morning News "The experience of reading his tightly contained memories in succession is a bit like drawing old coins up from a wishing well. Filtered through veils of distance and time, these scenes and reflections are wonderful and weird flashes of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the life of this particular Mexican American boy."-- Sophie Haigney, San Francisco Chronicle "Octavio Solis' Retablos recounts a 'beautiful, messy' youth on the border. Though its title evokes Mexican folk art, Retablos is closer in effect to that of French pointillism. Its small dabs of vivid color produce a brilliant cumulative effect."—Steven G. Kellman, The Texas Observer "In this debut memoir, playwright Solis delivers top-notch vignettes of his youth with riveting imagery and empathy, recounting--and embellishing, he says--memories of growing up brown in El Paso, Tex. . . . These brilliantly told stories of missteps and redemption are a treat."--Publishers Weekly ". . .what struck me most about each chapter was Solis's ability to plant a specific image in your mind. With every retablo, you can see in ferocious detail exactly what the author wants you to see, like a special kind of telepathy. I found myself wanting to paint them."—Caitlyn Reynolds, The Los Angeles Review of Books "In all, a beautiful, evocative, and timely expression of border culture for every collection."--Sara Martinez, Booklist "In this coming-of-age memoir, a playwright illuminates the culture of the El Paso border as he perceived it when he was young. . . . An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction."--Kirkus Reviews

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Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers--including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry--to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence in this world."These lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence--in all strata of society--has become a defining feature of our times."Many of us live today with a pervasive sense of unease, worried that our own safety is at risk, or that of our loved ones, or that of people whose bad circumstances appear to us through networked media. Violence feels ever-present. Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans help us to analyze those feelings, talking with a wide range of thinkers in order to gain insight into the worst of what humans do, and challenging us to imagine a world in which violence is no longer a given. Their book is full of surprising insights and intelligent compassion."--Sarah Leonard, co-editor of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century"In Violence, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard have created, alongside their interview subjects, a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence, in terrains expected and not, in prose taut and unexpectedly gorgeous. Their philosophical rigor provides the reader with an intellectual arsenal against the violence of the current moment."--Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood"We would be wise to read this collection with a similar eye toward service, and in so doing, open ourselves up to the rare mercy of no longer having to stand on our own."--Alana Massey, author of All The Lives I Want"The range of interviews with leading academics, to filmmakers and artists, is impressive, at once immediate and relevant, but also profoundly philosophical. More essentially, though, the conversations underline the need and suggest ways to resist and organize in a visionary way, in the extraordinary times we live in."--Razia Iqbal, BBC News"Notable contemporary thinkers and creators give their individual perspectives in this compelling look at violence. . . . A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by learning from its violent past."--Kirkus Reviews"The purpose of the work is to challenge humanity to create more meaningful solutions when it comes to these kinds of violence--or at least to name violence without inadvertently inciting even more anger. . . . passion roars through every chapter . . . This book delivers on what it promises, which is an achievement. "--Alison Gately, The Los Angeles Review of Books"If you wish to read the intellectualization of violence, Violence is a phenomenal anthology. . . . Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard, the interviewers and the 'authors' of the anthology, have done a remarkable job in bringing together perceptive and intelligent contributors from various fields to scout the reaches of violence. Their piercing questions brought out brilliant responses from the interviewees."--L. Ali Khan, New York Journal of Books"Violence: Humans in Dark Times is an intriguing beginning to a much-needed sustained intellectual and aesthetic response to the horrors of modern times."—Zoe Vorsino

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Celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán's first work to appear in English: a noir, feminist eco-thriller in which venally corrupt politicians and greedy land speculators finally get their just comeuppance!"In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing, but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight.Gustavo Varas, a principled journalist, picks up the trail, which leads him into a violent, lawless underworld. Bella Altamirano, a fearless local, is on her own crusade to pierce the settlement's code of silence, ignoring repeated death threats. It turns out that the disappearance of the candidate and those of the women are intimately connected, and not just to a local crime wave, but to a multinational magnate's plan to plunder the country's cloud forest preserve.Praise for Poso Wells:"The story is a condemnation not only of the corrupt businessmen and the criminal gangs that rule Poso Wells but also of the violence against women that plagues Latin America's real slums."—The New Yorker"One part Thomas Pynchon, one part Gabriel García Marquez, and one part Raymond Chandler, Alemán’s novel contains mystery, horror, humor, absurdity, and political commentary … A concoction of political thriller and absurdist literary mystery that never fails to entertain."—Kirkus Reviews"A wild, successful satire of Ecuadorian politics and supernatural encounters. … Alemán’s singular voice keeps the ride fresh and satisfying."—Publishers Weekly"Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A scifi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It's unclassifiable—as all great books are."—Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream"Poso Wells is brilliant, audacious, doubtlessly playful and at the same time so dark and bitter. A truly unforgettable book."—Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice

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"A highly relevant, inclusive collection of voices from the roots of resistance. . . . Empowering words to challenge, confront, and defy."--Kirkus Reviews"This book fights fascism. This books offers hope. We The Resistance is essential reading for those who wish to understand how popular movements built around nonviolence have changed the world and why they retain the power to do so again."—Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life "This comprehensive documentary history of non-violent resisters and resistance movements is an inspiring antidote to any movement fatigue or pessimism about the value of protest. It tells us we can learn from the past as we confront the present and hope to shape the future. Read, enjoy and take courage knowing you are never alone in trying to create a more just world. Persevere and persist and win, but know that even losing is worth the fight and teaches lessons for later struggles."—Mary Frances Berry, author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times"We the Resistance illustrates the deeply rooted, dynamic, and multicultural history of nonviolent resistance and progressive activism in North America and the United States. With a truly comprehensive collection of primary sources, it becomes clear that dissent has always been a central feature of American political culture and that periods of quiescence and consensus are aberrant rather than the norm. Indeed, the depth and breadth of resistant and discordant voices in this collection is simply outstanding."—Leilah Danielson, author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of American Radicalism in the Twentieth Century While historical accounts of the United States typically focus on the nation's military past, a rich and vibrant counterpoint remains basically unknown to most Americans. This alternate story of the formation of our nation—and its character—is one in which courageous individuals and movements have wielded the weapons of nonviolence to resist policies and practices they considered to be unjust, unfair, and immoral. We the Resistance gives curious citizens and current resisters unfiltered access to the hearts and minds—the rational and passionate voices—of their activist predecessors. Beginning with the pre-Revolutionary era and continuing through the present day, readers will directly encounter the voices of protesters sharing instructive stories about their methods (from sit-ins to tree-sitting) and opponents (from Puritans to Wall Street bankers), as well as inspirational stories about their failures (from slave petitions to the fight for the ERA) and successes (from enfranchisement for women to today's reform of police practices). Instruction and inspiration run throughout this captivating reader, generously illustrated with historic graphics and photographs of nonviolent protests throughout U.S. history.

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While famous for his celebrated novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry always considered himself a poet. First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle--with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle's fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction--but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."-William T. Vollman

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From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bells Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski's talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction. An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and chaotic tales, revealing the hidden hand of the master at the top of his form. "The uncollected gutbucket ramblings of the grand dirty old man of Los Angeles letters have been gathered in this characteristically filthy, funny compilation ...Bukowkski's gift was a sense for the raunchy absurdity of life, his writing a grumble that might turn into a belly laugh or a racking cough but that always throbbed with vital energy."--Kirkus Reviews Born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. He died of leukemia in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994. David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited three previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Absence of the Hero, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

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Praise for Michael McClure: "Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence."--Robert Creeley "McClure's poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy."--Allen Ginsberg "Without McClure's roar there would have been no Sixties."--Dennis Hopper Michael McClure is a living legend. One of the poets who participated in the famous Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl, he was immortalized by Jack Kerouac in his novel Big Sur. A central figure of the Beat Generation, McClure collaborated with Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner and was later associated with San Francisco's psychedelic counterculture. Originally self-published in 1964 and long out of print, Ghost Tantras is one of McClure's signature works, a book mostly written in "beast language." A mix of lyrical, guttural, and laryngeal sound, lion roars, and a touch of detonated dada, this is one of his best-known but least available books, a deep well from which decades of poetry have drawn. McClure's inspiration has always been the animal consciousness that still lives in mankind, and he has had a consistent message: "When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal." Ghost Tantras is his original and singular manifesto for a poetry that relies not on images and pictures, but on muscular, sensual, energetic sound. Michael McClure has received numerous awards and continues to reach new audiences through his poetry, plays, and performance.

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Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements. This new release of a classic collection of his writings and speeches traces the development of Newton's personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party. More than just a historic record, Newton's prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today. Huey Newton was the founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the Black Panther Party, and one of America's most dynamic and important revolutionary philosophers.

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"He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It's a full house--read 'em and weep."--Tom Waits After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski suddenly found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, in one form or another, through the mid-1980s. More Notes of a Dirty Old Man gathers many uncollected gems from the column's twenty-year run. Drawn from ephemeral underground publications, these stories and essays haven't been seen in decades, making More a valuable addition to Bukowski's oeuvre. Filled with his usual obsessions--sex, booze, gambling--More features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured, violent relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry reading circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly veiled autobiography to purely fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters, climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers, "My Friend the Gambler," based on his experiences making the movie Barfly. From his lowly days at the post office through his later literary fame, More follows the entire arc of Bukowski's colorful career. Edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man features an afterword outlining the history of the column and its effect on the author's creative development. Born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, Charles Bukowski came to California at age three and spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994.

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Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous and controversial figures of 20th-century American literature, was so prolific that many important pieces were never collected during his lifetime. Portions is a substantial selection of these wide-ranging works, most of which have been unavailable since their original appearance in underground newspapers, literary journals, even porno mags. Among the highlights are his first published short story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip"; his last short story, "The Other"; his first and last essays; and the first installment of his famous "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column. The book contains meditations on his familiar themes (drinking, horse-racing, etc.) as well as singular discussions of such figures as Artaud, Pound, and the Rolling Stones. Other significant works include the experimental title piece; a fictionalized account of meeting his hero, John Fante ("I Meet the Master"); an unflinching review of Hemingway ("An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck"); the intense, autobiographical "Dirty Old Man Confesses"; and several discussions of his aesthetics ("A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-Pack (Tall)," "In Defense of a Certain Type of Poetry, a Certain Type of Life, a Certain Type of Blood-Filled Creature Who Will Someday Die," and "Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way", revealing an unexpectedly learned mind behind his seemingly offhand productions. Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook is essential reading for Bukowski fans, as well as a good introduction for new readers of this innovative, unconventional writer. "Finally, after Bukowski's nearly 50 published books: novels, short stories, poetry, letters, essays, etc. David Calonne has unearthed Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook, the previously missing link in Bukowski's oeuvre that suddenly makes everything come clear." --John Martin, Black Sparrow Press "You know, I just think this is really hot. Among its many gifts, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook has one of the best lesbian sex scenes I ever read. I read Bukowski standing up one day in a bookstore (City Lights) and thought he did it too. What Henry Miller did. He wrote American. When it meant something good. Fucked up, male, but incredibly true. In a distinct rhythm." --Eileen Myles, author of Sorry, Tree and Cool for You "Bukowski wrote the way he lived, and Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook is as vivid, bad-ass, screamingly funny, and gutter-angelic as the man himself. Reading these stories and essays, you can hear the beating heart of the poet in every line. Bukowski never wasted a word, and this collection should go far towards shining a light on prose in danger of being lost in the shadow of its larger-than-life author. Those new to his work will have the good fortune of discovering a writer who could break your heart, make you howl, and slap you off your bar-stool you in a single sentence. In a world long since gone lousy with faux hard-living typers and posers, he was the original." --Jerry Stahl author of Permanent Midnight, Perv, Plainclothes Naked, and I, Fatty. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including books published by City Lights Publishers such as Notes of a Dirty Old Man, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and Absence of the Hero.

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When it appeared in France in 1955, A Panorama of American Film Noir was the first book ever on the genre: this clairvoyant study of Hollywood film noir is at last available in English translation. A Panorama of American Film Noir addresses the essential amorality of its subject from a decidedly Surrealist angle, focusing on noir's dreamlike, unwonted, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel atmosphere, and setting it in the social context of mid-century America. Beginning with the first film noir, The Maltese Falcon, and continuing through the post war "glory days," which included such films as Gilda, The Big Sheep, Dark Passage, and The Lady from Shanghai, Borde and Chaumeton examine the dark sides of American society, film, and literature that made film noir possible, even necessary. A Panorama of American Film Noir includes a film noir chronology, a voluminous filmography, a comprehensive index, and a selection of black-and-white production stills. "Incredibly, this is the first English translation of the very influential 1955 French book that initially identified, described and assessed the Hollywood movies that we now term film noir ...a seminal work of cinema description and analysis and therefore an essential purchase for most libraries. " --From the Starred Review in Library Journal Raymond Borde (1920 - 2004), founder of the Cinematheque de Toulouse, wrote extensively on film history.; among his short films is a study of the artist Pierre Molinier. Etienne Chaumeton was the film critic of the Toulouse newspaper La Depeche until his death.

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing, and defending Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and censorship of literary works. This collection begins with an introduction by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shares his memories of hearing "Howl" first read at the 6 Gallery, of his arrest, and the subsequent legal defense of Howl's publication. Never-before--published correspondence of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Hollander, Richard Eberhart, and others provides an in-depth commentary on the poem's ethi-cal intent and its social significance to the author and his contemporaries. A section on the public reaction to the trial includes newspaper reportage, op-ed pieces by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, and letters to the editor from the public, which provide fascinating background material on the cultural climate of the mid-1950s. A timeline of literary censorship in the United States places this battle for free expression in a historical context. Also included are photographs, transcripts of relevant trial testimony, Judge Clayton Horn's decision and its ramifications, and a long essay by Albert Bendich, the ACLU attorney who defended Howl on constitutional grounds. Editor Bill Morgan discusses more recent challenges to Howl in the late 1980s and how the fight against censorship continues today in new guises.

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"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems. Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru--a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book. "...make no mistake, Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 ...is genuine poetry, and Ginsberg's commitment marks his superiority over more graceful and refined but tepid craftsmen." --Robert D. Spector, Poetry Quarterly Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.

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Essays on racial flashpoints, white denial, violence, and the manipulation of fear in America today."Drawing on events from the killing of Trayvon Martin to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, Wise calls to account his fellow white citizens and exhorts them to combat racist power structures."—The New York Times“What Tim Wise has brilliantly done is to challenge white folks' truth to see that they have a responsibility to do more than sit back and watch, but to recognize their own role in co-creating a fair, inclusive, truly democratic society.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow"Tim Wise's new book gives us the tools we need to reach people whose understanding of our country is white instead of right. And without pissing them off!"—James W. Loewen, author, Lies My Teacher Told Me"Tim Wise's latest is more urgent than ever. "—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy"A white social justice advocate clearly shows how racism is America's core crisis. A trenchant assessment of our nation’s ills."—*Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review" [Dispatches from the Race War] is a bracing call to action in a moment of social unrest."—Publishers Weekly"Dispatches from the Race War exhorts white Americans to join the struggle for a fairer society."—Chapter 16In this collection of essays, renowned social-justice advocate Tim Wise confronts racism in contemporary America. Seen through the lens of major flashpoints during the Obama and Trump years, Dispatches from the Race War faces the consequences of white supremacy in all its forms. This includes a discussion of the bigoted undertones of the Tea Party’s backlash, the killing of Trayvon Martin, current day anti-immigrant hysteria, the rise of openly avowed white nationalism, the violent policing of African Americans, and more.Wise devotes a substantial portion of the book to explore the racial ramifications of COVID-19, and the widespread protests which followed the police murder of George Floyd.Concise, accessible chapters, most written in first-person, offer an excellent source for those engaged in the anti-racism struggle. Tim Wise’s proactive approach asks white allies to contend with—and take responsibility for—their own role in perpetuating racism against Blacks and people of color.Dispatches from the Race War reminds us that the story of our country is the history of racial conflict, and that our future may depend on how—or if—we can resolve it. “To accept racism is quintessentially American,” writes Wise, “to rebel against it is human. Be human.”

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Neruda's long-overlooked third book of poetry, critical in his poetic evolution, now translated into English for the very first time! Over twenty books by Pablo Neruda, the legendary Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate, have been translated into English, a testament to his enormous appeal. Yet, the work Neruda pointed to as "one of the most important books of my poetry," has been woefully neglected and remains virtually unknown. venture of the infinite man was Neruda's third book, published in 1926, two years after his widely celebrated and still much beloved Twenty Love Poems. In a stark stylistic departure from the love poems, Neruda discarded rhyme, meter, punctuation and capitalization in an attempt to better capture the voice of the subconscious. In an epic poem comprised of fifteen cantos spread over 44 un-numbered pages, the Infinite Man sets forth on a virtual sleepwalk through time and space, on a quest to atone for his past and to rediscover himself. Neruda's readers were not prepared for this experiment, and venture did not garner the reception Neruda had hoped for. Indeed, decades after its publication, he lamented that it remained "the least read and least studied of all my work." venture is a strikingly clear example of a poet's creative and intellectual development, bridging the aching, plain lyricism of Love Poems, and the unique hermeticism of Neruda's next book, the landmark Residence on Earth. Neruda considered venture essential to his evolution: "Within its smallness and minimal expression, more than most of my works, it claimed, it secured, the path that I had to follow." Its long-overdue translation into English is cause for celebration! "Experimental, obscure, timeless, essential, venture of the infinite man, published two years after his famous Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, set Pablo Neruda on his course toward becoming the greatest poet in the history of the Spanish language. Its publication in English is a historic event, above all today, above all in this moment, above all, now."—Raúl Zurita "In his early twenties and after the enormous success of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda surprised everyone by changing aesthetic gears in this book that was at once innovative and emblematic. The effort was part of what would ultimately become his ceaseless embrace of change as the sine qua non of style. Jessica Powell does wonders rendering these cantos for the first time into English, filling in a gap his legion of admirers will be thankful for. This isn't only an unseen Neruda but an unforeseen one too."—Ilan Stavans, editor of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda "What an act of generosity this book is. Eisner's introduction contextualizes and informs precisely as needed, and Jessica Powell’s translation achieves astonishing beauty and refreshing truth. She has listened deeply to Neruda’s text."—Katherine Silver "Jessica Powell is the 'distant light that illuminates the fruit' of venture of the infinite man, the twenty-two year old Pablo Neruda’s untranslated third book. One part quest and one part inner map, in Powell’s hands the delicious and strange language of the original dances effortlessly in English. Readers can now experience the moment Neruda evolved from being only a brilliant singer of love poems into a maker of rich, stunning worlds. This book is a treasure."—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Patient Zero "This book has the fascination of being Neruda becoming Neruda. It's the brilliant young poet who made himself famous at nineteen and twenty with Twenty Love Poems, beginning to absorb the lessons of the new surrealism and making his way to the world poet he would become in Residence on Earth. So it is a leap into the imagination of one of the crucial poets of the twentieth century as he is feeling his way."—Robert Hass

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Voted a Best Poetry Book of the Year by Library JournalIncluded in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of the YearOne of LitHub's most Anticipated Books of the Year!A State of the Union from the nation’s first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope."Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."—New York Times"Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."—NPR"Juan Felipe Herrera's magnificent new poems in Every Day We Get More Illegal testify to the deepest parts of the American dream—the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants and futures that belong to all—from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate song than any anthem stirring the blood."—Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine"From Basho to Mandela, Every Day We Get More Illegal takes us on an international tour for a lesson in the history of resistance from a poet who declares, 'I had to learn . . . to take care of myself . . . the courage to listen to my self.' You hold in your hands evidence of who we really are."—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition"These poems talk directly to America, to migrant people, and to working people. Herrera has created a chorus to remind us we are alive and beautiful and powerful."—José Olivarez, Author of Citizen Illegal"The poet comes to his country with a book of songs, and asks: America, are you listening? We better listen. There is wisdom in this book, there is a choral voice that teaches us 'to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the courage.' The courage to find more grace, to find flames."—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicIn this collection of poems, written during and immediately after two years on the road as United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera reports back on his travels through contemporary America. Poems written in the heat of witness, and later, in quiet moments of reflection, coalesce into an urgent, trenchant, and yet hope-filled portrait. The struggle and pain of those pushed to the edges, the shootings and assaults and injustices of our streets, the lethal border game that separates and divides, and then: a shift of register, a leap for peace and a view onto the possibility of unity.Every Day We Get More Illegal is a jolt to the conscience—filled with the multiple powers of the many voices and many textures of every day in America."Former Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera should also be Laureate of our Millennium—a messenger who nimbly traverses the transcendental liminalities of the United States . . ."—Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Be Recorder

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"As a pandemic rages and we are unable to gather to celebrate our dead, make our minyans, or hold one another’s hands, have our seders, I think of Ginsberg writing Kaddish for his mother. I think of him imagining a journey from bondage to freedom. . . . Kaddish is the perfect poem for these times."—Laurel Brett, The ForwardAllen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," a poem about the death of his mother, Naomi, is one of his major works. This special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kaddish and Other Poems features an illuminating afterword by Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan, along with previously unpublished photographs, documents, and letters relating to the composition of the poem.Allen Ginsberg, founding father of the Beat Generation, inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the twentieth century with his groundbreaking poems. Bill Morgan is the author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. He lives in New York City and Bennington, Vermont."In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural and gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other."—Allen Ginsberg from Kaddish"Kaddish, Ginsberg's ode to his mother after her death, is streaked with references to Judaism and to the funerary prayer recited by a male mourner for the passing of a parent or relative. Like the prayer, Ginsberg’s poem is a celebration of his mother, but it also delves into—and, indeed, dwells on—the darker side of her life. . . . Ginsberg bears witness to his mother's pain and struggles; he intones her name—another act of remembrance—over and over again as if to deify her."—Maria Eliades, Ploughshares"Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg's most stunning and emotional poem, tells a story that is entirely true. As a young boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Allen watched his mother succumb to a series of psychotic episodes that grew progressively worse despite desperate attempts at treatment."—Levi Asher, Literary KicksKaddish, which Ginsberg wrote between 1957 and 1959 and published in 1961, is, at its core, a poem about a son learning to grieve for his mother. But Ginsberg's emotional and intellectual rawness make this poem an investigation about what it means to grieve, or even to be a son or mother. A deeply intimate portrait of his family's life, Kaddish nonetheless embeds itself in specific historical contexts: of Jewish life in the United States and after the Holocaust, of left-wing political activism before and during the Cold War, of a fiercely independent woman who died as second-wave feminism was only just beginning to be formulated."—Joshua Logan Wall, The Yiddish Book Center's "Great Jewish Books, Teacher Resources" "Ginsberg’s long, graphic, lamenting elegy for his mother is one of the most shattering poems written in this century. Harrowing. Grotesque. Hilarious. Non-stop in its verbal energy....I love these little City Lights collections—they’re certainly more fun than the big Collected Poems (Harper), easier to carry, easier to hold, and easier to read."—Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop

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Exquisite hardcover gift edition of the groundbreaking poetry collection by the leader of the "New York School" of poetry, Frank O'Hara. Published on the 50th anniversary of Lunch Poems.Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "The Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria," and "Poem" [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems—casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading—that made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets.This new limited 50th anniversary edition contains a preface by John Ashbery and an editor's note by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with facsimile reproductions of a selection of previously unpublished correspondence between Ferlinghetti and O'Hara that shed new light on the preparation of Lunch."I hope that everyone will delight in the new edition of Frank's LUNCH POEMS. The correspondence between Lawrence and Frank is great. Frank was just 33 when he wrote to Lawrence in 1959 and 38 when LUNCH POEMS was published! The fact that City Lights kept Frank's LUNCH POEMS in print all these years has been extraordinary, wonderful and a constant comfort. Hurray for independent publishers and independent bookstores. Many thanks always to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and everyone at City Lights." —Maureen O'Hara, sister of Frank O'Hara"O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."—Dwight Garner, New York Times"As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights."—Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review"What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction — that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes"The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience—much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds."—Micah Mattix, The Atlantic

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Mexico is in a state of siege. Since President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs in December 2006, more than 38,000 Mexican have been murdered. During the same period, drug money has infused over $130 billion into Mexico's economy, now the country's single largest source of income. Corruption and graft infiltrate all levels of government. Entire towns have become ungovernable, and of every 100 people killed, Mexican police now only investigate approximately 5 eases. But the market is booming: In 2009, more people in the United States bought recreational drugs than ever before. In 2009, the United Nations reported that some $350 billion in drug money had been successfully laundered into the global banking system the prior year, saving it from collapse. How does an "extra" $350 billion in the global economy affect the murder rate in Mexico? To get the story and connect the dogs, acclaimed journalist John Gibler travels across Mexico and slips behind the frontlines to talk with people who live in towns under assault: newspaper reporters and crime-beat photographers, funeral parlor workers, convicted drug traffickers, government officials, cab drivers and others who find themselves living on the lawless frontiers of the drug war. Gibler tells hair-raising stories of wild street battles, kidnappings, narrow escapes, politicians on the take, and the ordinary people who fight for justice as they seek solutions to the crisis that is tearing Mexico apart. Fast-paced and urgent, To Die in Mexico is an extraordinary look inside the raging drug war, and its global implications. John Gibler is a writer based in Mexico and California, the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (City Lights Books, 2009), and a contributor to Pais de muertos: Cronicas contra la impunidad (Random House Mondadori, 2011). He is a correspondent for KPFA in San Francisco and has published in magazines in the United States and Mexico, including Left Turn, Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, ColorLines, Race, Poverty, and the Environment Fifth Estate, New Politics, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Contralinea, and Milenio Semanal. "Gibler's front-line reportage coupled with first-rate analysis gives an uncommonly vivid and nuanced picture of a society riddled and enervated by corruption, shootouts, and raids, where murder is the 'most popular method of conflict resolution.' ...At great personal risk, the author unearths stories the mainstream media doesn't-or is it too afraid-to cover, and gives voice to those who have been silenced or whose stories have been forgotten." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "Gibler argues passionately to undercut this 'case study in failure.' The drug barons are only getting richer, the murders mount and the police and military repression expand as 'illegality increases the value of the commodity.' With legality, both U.S. and Mexican society could address real issues of substance abuse through education and public-health initiatives. A visceral, immediate and reasonable argument." -Kirkus Reviews "Gibler provides a fascinating and detailed insight into the history of both drug use in the US and the 'war on drugs' unleashed by Ronald Reagan through the very plausible -- but radical -- lens of social control...Throughout this short but powerful book, Gibler accompanies journalists riding the grim carousel of death on Mexico's streets, exploring the realities of a profession under siege in states such as Sinaloa and just how they cover the drugs war." -Gavin O'Toole, The Latin American Review of Books

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2020 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."—The New York Times"The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life."—San Francisco Chronicle"Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."—Booklist“He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”—Lawrence FerlinghettiBob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic. Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman’s known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books.Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman:"Bob Kaufman 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, author of Compression & Purity"Bob Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power.”—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism"Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future’s light is the mission of the Collected 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 Daáood, author of The Language of Saxophones"To call these poems 'surreal' seems, now, to muffle Kaufman’s prophetic genius. He saw us, our images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the reflections."—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies"Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats. … Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and abysmal despair."—Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ

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Essential radical texts by enslaved, jailed, and imprisoned Americans, edited by renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and activist-scholar Jennifer Black. “Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out.”—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography “Martin Luther King told us what he saw when he went to the mountaintop....But there’s also the foot of the mountain, and there are also the regions beneath the surface. I want to try to tell you a little something about those regions.”—Angela Y. Davis, author of Angela Davis: An AutobiographyBeneath the Mountain is a reader’s guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of insurgent writin

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Profound meditations on life, death, freedom, family, and faith, written by radical Black journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, while he was awaiting his execution."Uncompromising, disturbing . . . Abu-Jamal's voice has the clarity and candor of a man whose impending death emboldens him to say what is on his mind without fear of consequence."—The Boston Globe"A brilliant, lucid meditation on the moral obligation of political commitment by a deeply ethical—and deeply wronged—human being. Mumia should be freed, now."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor & Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University"A brilliant, powerful book by a prophetic writer . . . his language glows with an affirming flame."—Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age and Rachel and Her ChildrenJournalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned since 1982 for the killing of a police officer, a crime he steadfastly maintained he did not commit. In 1996, after serving more than a decade on death row, and with the likelihood of execution looming, he began receiving regular visits from members of the Bruderhof spiritual community, a group of refugees from Hitler's Germany. Inspired by these encounters, Mumia began to write a series of personal essays reflecting on his search for spiritual meaning within a society plagued by materialism, hypocrisy, and violence. "Many people say it is insane to resist the system," writes Mumia, "but actually it is insane not to."This expanded edition of Death Blossoms brings a classic, influential work back into print with a new introduction by Mumia, and includes the entire text of a groundbreaking report by Amnesty International detailing the legal improprieties and chronic injustices that marred his trial.Praise for Death Blossoms, Expanded Edition:"For years in my classrooms I have watched Death Blossoms do its luminous work. It has awakened the conscience of so many of my student readers. Once awakened, they begin to shoulder the disciplines of its revolutionary knowing, moral passion, historical precision and clarity of reason. No wonder repressive powers seek death for this prisoner of conscience. Alas for them, Mumia still lives. From streets to classrooms and back, Death Blossoms keeps opening up consciences, hearts, and minds for our revolutionary work."—Mark Lewis Taylor, Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, and author of The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World"Targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO for his revolutionary politics, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, Mumia found freedom in resistance. His reflections here—on race, spirituality, on struggle, and life—illuminate this path to freedom for us all."—Joshua Bloom, co-author with Waldo E. Martin Jr. of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party"In this revised edition of his groundbreaking work, Death Blossoms, convicted death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal tackles hard and existential questions, searching for God and a greater meaning in a caged life that may be cut short if the state has its way and takes his life. As readers follow Mumia's journey through his poems, short essays, and longer musings, they will learn not only about this singular individual who has retained his humanity despite the ever present threat of execution, but also about themselves and our society: what we are willing to tolerate and who we are willing to cast aside. If there is any justice, Mumia will prevail in his battle for his life and for his freedom."—Lara Bazelon, author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction"Mumia Abu-Jamal has challenged us to see the prison at the center of a long history of US oppression, and he has inspired us to keep faith with ordinary struggles against injustice under the most terrible odds and circumstances. Written more than two decades ago, Death Blossoms helps us to see beyond prison walls; it is as timely and as necessary as the day it was published."—Nikhil Pal Singh, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program, author of Race and America's Long War"For over three decades, the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal have been tools many young activists have used to connect the dots of empire, racism, and resistance. The welcome reissue of Death Blossoms is a chance to reconnect with Abu-Jamal's prophetic voice, one that needs to be heard now more than ever."—Hilary Moore and James Tracy, co-authors of No Fascist USA!, The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements

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"Impeaching the President is lucid, balanced, and deeply informed. Anyone in search of a reasoned guide to the unreason of our current situation should read it."—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction"Ousting a president is a complicated and uncertain endeavor, according to this perceptive study of impeachments. . . . [This book] shrewdly assesses the impeachability of President Trump based on his alleged offenses . … Hirsch's lucid prose and careful analysis make the book a fine corrective to cavalier popular rhetoric surrounding discussions of impeachment."— Publishers Weekly "A masterpiece for the masses."—Ralph Nader"Amid the partisan passion, an illuminating primer of analysis and context lowers the temperature on this hot-button issue. . . . A cogent analysis that builds a common-sense case for proceeding with caution and against using impeachment as a partisan weapon."—Kirkus Reviews" The reader gets a hearty mix of American history, political intrigue, and constitutional law, all adhered with Hirsch's amazing writing. He captures the political chaos surrounding each prior case, yanking the reader out of our present exceptionalism to see the evolution of impeachment with the proper context and clarity. Can't recommend it enough."—Travis Cohen, Brookline Booksmith, MA"In an era when the notion of impeachment is tossed around as the ultimate political indictment, Alan Hirsch guides us with a steady hand through our own history to consider the three presidents who faced that ultimate punishment. This is a sober, precise, and carefully argued analysis that should be read by every member of Congress—and every president."—David K. Shipler, former reporter for the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize recipient"Alan Hirsch brings clarity, wisdom, and wit to a contentious and critical subject. Impeaching the President is must reading for all concerned citizens."—Howard Shapiro, former FBI General Counsel"Incredibly readable, well-researched, analytically sound and important."—Alan B. Morrison, Associate Dean for Public Interest & Public Service at the George Washington Law SchoolDonald J. Trump is only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Constitutional scholar Alan Hirsch offers clear and to-the-point guidance for all matters relating to removing a sitting president, including: the Founders' vision for checking presidential power; the impeachment stories of presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton; wrongdoing in the Trump administration; and the availability of the 25th Amendment and presidential self-pardon.Illustrated throughout with historical engravings, photographs, and other impeachment documentation, this concise, timely, and accessible analysis offers an invaluable perspective on how the Constitution provides stability during times of political upheaval.

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"Benjamin Hedin went looking for the civil rights movement's past, but he also ran smack into the present, which can suddenly look like the past and then just as suddenly look totally different. By bringing stirring people like Septima Clark into focus, Hedin does what good historians do, but by entwining history with current events, he does a lot more. Here is a haunting meditation on living in history as well as with it."--Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln "In Search of the Movement is a true marvel. Benjamin Hedin's insightful combination of reportage and history of the Civil Rights movement allows us to see the era with fresh eyes. By tracing the continued legacy of the black freedom struggle from the 1960s to the present, this gem of a book wonderfully illuminates how the movement is living and thriving in our own time."--Peniel Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life and Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America "Beloved community and the exuberant humanism of the Civil Rights movement have never been so vividly rendered. Carry this book with you as a guide through our own anxious age. Beautifully written, sharply observed, whimsical and tender, In Search of the Movement is a road trip into America's better self."--Charles Marsh, author of God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights In March of 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands in an epic march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery, in what is often seen as the culminating moment of the Civil Rights movement. The Voting Rights Act was signed into law that year, and with Jim Crow eradicated, and schools being desegregated, the movement had supposedly come to an end. America would go on to record its story as an historic success. Recently, however, the New York Times featured an article that described the reversion of Little Rock's schools to all-black or all-white. The next day, the paper printed a story about a small town in Alabama where African Americans were being denied access to the polls. Massive demonstrations in cities across the country protest the killing of black men by police, while we celebrate a series of 50th-anniversary commemorations of the signature events of the Civil Rights movement. In such a time it is important to ask: In the last fifty years, has America progressed on matters of race, or are we stalled--or even moving backward? With these questions in mind, Benjamin Hedin set out to look for the Civil Rights movement. "I wanted to find the movement in its contemporary guise," he writes, "which also meant answering the critical question of what happened to it after the 1960s." He profiles legendary figures like John Lewis, Robert Moses, and Julian Bond, and also visits with contemporary leaders such as William Barber II and the staff of the Dream Defenders. But just as powerful--and instructional--are the stories of those whose work goes unrecorded, the organizers and teachers who make all the rest possible. In these pages the movement is portrayed as never before, as a vibrant tradition of activism that remains in our midst. In Search of the Movement is a fascinating meditation on the patterns of history, as well as an indelible look at the meaning and limits of American freedom. Benjamin Hedin has written for the New Yorker, Slate, the Nation, and the Chicago Tribune. He's the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, and the producer and author of a forthcoming documentary film, The Blues House.

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Winner - Best Transgender Nonfiction - 2015 Lambda Literary Awards Best Books of 2014 - Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2014 - NPR Books Best Nonficton Books of 2014 - Kirkus Reviews 10 Best Transgender Non-Fiction Books - Advocate "Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It's a confession, it's a poem, it's a time warp, it's a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee--his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."--Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be. Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one--how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility. Praise for Man Alive: "Man Alive is a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir ...about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostly it's about love, so much love. McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive."--Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State "Thomas Page McBee's story of how he came to claim both his past and his future is by turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self. I loved this book." --Ann Friedman, columnist, New York Magazine "'Whoever's child I am, my body belongs to me,' McBee writes, and his book is an elegant, generous transcription of the journey toward this incandescent, non-aggrandized, life-sustaining form of self-possession--the kind that emanates from dispossession, rather than running from it."--Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning "Well aware that memory and identity rarely follow a linear path, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer the question, 'What does it really mean to be a man?' Weaving past and present to do so, the book's journey connects violence, masculinity and forgiveness. McBee has an intelligent heart, and it beats in every sentence of this gorgeous book."----Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to Bruise "Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative." --Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure About the Author: Thomas Page McBee was the "masculinity expert" for VICE and writes the columns "Self-Made Man" for The Rumpus and "The American Man" for Pacific Standard. His essays and reportage have appeared in the the New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Salon, and BuzzFeed, where he was a regular contributor on gender issues. He lives in New York City where he works as the editor of special projects at Quartz, and is currently at work on a book about modern American masculinity.

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"Giroux refuses to give in or give up. The Violence of Organized Forgetting is a clarion call to imagine a different America--just, fair, and caring--and then to struggle for it."--Bill Moyers "Henry Giroux has accomplished an exciting, brilliant intellectual dissection of America's somnambulent voyage into anti-democratic political depravity. His analysis of the plight of America's youth is particularly heartbreaking. If we have a shred of moral fibre left in our beings, Henry Giroux sounds the trumpet to awaken it to action to restore to the nation a civic soul."--Dennis J. Kucinich, former US Congressman and Presidential candidate "Giroux lays out a blistering critique of an America governed by the tenets of a market economy...He cites French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman's concept of the 'disimagination machine' to describe a culture and pedagogical philosophy that short-circuits citizens' ability to think critically, leaving the generation now reaching adulthood unprepared for an 'inhospitable' world. Picking apart the current malaise of 21st-century digital disorder, Giroux describes a world in which citizenship is replaced by consumerism and the functions of engaged governance are explicitly beholden to corporations."--Publishers Weekly In a series of essays that explore the intersections of politics, popular culture, and new forms of social control in American society, Henry A. Giroux explores how state and corporate interests have coalesced to restrict civil rights, privatize what's left of public institutions, and diminish our collective capacity to participate as engaged citizens of a democracy. From the normalization of mass surveillance, lockdown drills, and a state of constant war, to corporate bailouts paired with public austerity programs that further impoverish struggling families and communities, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the forces of government and business are at work to generate a culture of mass forgetfulness, obedience and conformity. In The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Giroux deconstructs the stories created to control us while championing the indomitable power of education, democracy, and hope. Henry A. Giroux is a world-renowned educator, author and public intellectual. He currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. The Toronto Star has named Henry Giroux "one of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think." More Praise for Henry A. Giroux's The Violence of Organized Forgetting: "I can think of no book in the last ten years as essential as this. I can think of no other writer who has so clinically dissected the crisis of modern life and so courageously offered a possibility for real material change."--John Steppling, playwright, and author of The Shaper, Dogmouth, and Sea of Cortez "A timely study if there ever was one, The Violence of Organized Forgetting is a milestone in the struggle to repossess the common sense expropriated by the American power elite to be redeployed in its plot to foil the popular resistance against rising social injustice and decay of political democracy."--Zygmunt Bauman, author of Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? among other works Prophetic and eloquent, Giroux gives us, in this hard-hitting and compelling book, the dark scenario of Western crisis where ignorance has become a virtue and wealth and power the means of ruthless abuse of workers, of the minorities and of immigrants. However, he remains optimistic in his affirmation of radical humanity, determined as he is to relate himself to a fair and caring world unblemished by anti-democratic political depravity."--Shelley Walia, Frontline

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"Mylene Fernandez offers us a magnificent gift. Her story of lost love and the difficult pursuit of literature is at the same time an X-ray of life in Havana, set in a present where glimpses of the future have not yet arrived."--Leonardo Padura, author of The Man Who Loved Dogs and the Mario Conde novels of Havana In contemporary Havana, "Do I stay or do I go?" is always the question, and love doesn't necessarily conquer all. A cautious, reserved professor of Spanish Literature, Marian has no idea that her quiet life is about to be turned upside down. When she's asked to review the work of a young, ambitious first-time novelist, she meets Daniel, and their love affair leads her to question both the choices she's made so far in her life and the opportunities she might yet still have. Theirs is the story of an intense and impossible love, set in today's Havana, a city where there can be no plans, where chance is the order of the day and a fierce sense of loyalty and pride coexists with the desire to live beyond the island's isolation. "The fresh panorama of Cuban society today is painted without taboos or constraints, with a faith in human possibilities, and above all with a courage that stems from what is most legitimate and durable in ourselves."--Nancy Morejon, author of Looking Within: Selected Poems and Piedra Pulida "A Corner of the World is about desires and dreams, and, of course, about love."--Achy Obejas, author of Days of Awe and Ruins "Like the best of Truman Capote, another master of the short novel, Mylene Fernandez gives us a cast of unforgettable characters: contradictory, complex, and human."--Fernando Perez, director of Suite Habana, Life Is to Whistle, and Madagascar "To read this book is to encounter one of the best and most intimate works of Cuban literature of the 21st century."--Mabel Cuesta, author of Cuba post-sovietica: un cuerpo narrado en clave de mujer "A sad, erotic, tender, and sometimes ironic tale of passion and desertion...the city becomes a co-protagonist, a confidante, a point of departure and return, and of waiting."-Senel Paz, novelist and screenwriter of Strawberry and Chocolate, Things I Left in Havana, and In the Sky with Diamonds

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"This new and valuable book delves into the 'interior' experience of voodoo, as opposed to the usual outsider focus on ritual and cosmology. In telling the story of her own initiation and painstaking education in voodoo, Beaubrun takes us into the mystical dimensions of this ancient religion."--The Guardian UK Like all the great religions Vodou has an external, public practice of rituals and ceremonies--and also an internal, mystical dimension. Before Nan Domi, works about Vodou have concentrated on the spectacular outward manifestations of Vodou observance--hypnotic drumming and chanting, frenetic dancing, fits of spirit possession. But practically all reports on Vodou are outsider accounts, which means that they are stopped at the threshold. Mimerose Beaubrun, educated as an anthropologist, set out to write another such work, but in the process she met the woman who would become her ultimate teacher and guide to the religion's internal mysteries: Tante Tansia, whose knowledge, wisdom and spiritual power govern the text of Nan Domi. Nan Domi is the only account of Vodou's private, mystical, interior practice that has been offered to the public so far. Its content stands in the same relation to ceremonial Vodou as Zen to conventional Buddhism, Sufism to conventional Islam, the practice of the desert saints to conventional Christianity. Mimerose Beaubrun has been a student of Vodou for half of her life, but she is also an adept, and in this uniquely valuable work, she divests herself of all scholarly apparatus to speak from Vodou's purest heart. This English edition includes a fascinating introduction by Madison Smartt Bell, placing the religion and Beaubrun's memoir in historical context. Praise for Nan Domi: "Mimerose Beaubrun's book Nan Domi: An Initiate's Journey into Haitian Vodou -- the first part of the title refers to a spiritual state -- is a welcome addition to the canon of vodou scholarship, a deeply felt inside account of a faith of often daunting complexity."--The Miami Herald "Nan Domi is a fascinating look inside the Haitian Vodou religion. Mimerose Beaubrun provides a valuable contribution taking us along into the world of Nan Domi, a dream state and stage in the initiate's journey to mastery ...In the process the reader is introduced into a world that is far more than a religious tradition. Haitian Vodou is also a way of speaking about Haiti, as Beaubrun explains, 'its language, culture, even its way of walking, of preparing food, of dressing, of making love, of communicating with unknown worlds.' The book casts its spell on the reader who persists in the journey under the tutelage of Beaubrun and her teachers. Madison Smartt Bell's excellent introduction places the religion and Beaubrun's memoir in historical context."--Julia Alvarez "Vodou is one of the most valuable--and misunderstood--of all New World cultural creations. Mimerose Beaubrun's remarkable work opens up for the first time the internal world of Vodou, and what emerges is a singular engagement with a system of belief that cannot fail to impress any reader with its sheer sophistication and complexity. Gradually, the author recounts the ways in which she came to know the timeless wisdom of Vodou. Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Haiti, or in religion and society more broadly." --Martin Munro, author and editor of Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010

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The Obama presidency represented a major milestone in African American history. The very presence of a black First Family had a profound cultural impact, but did the Obama White House actually addressed any of the ongoing issues faced by Black America? Did communities of color organized sufficiently to voice their concerns? How could lessons learned from past freedom struggles guide the organizing that's needed to meet today's opportunities and challenges? To explore these questions in depth, international journalist Joanne Griffith traveled the country to interview black intellectuals, activists, authors, and educators, including former advisor to former President Obama, Van Jones; civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander; economist, Julianne Malveaux; and friend and speech writer for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Vincent Harding. The result was a wide-ranging exploration of the hot-button issues facing America today, from economics, education and the law, to the cultural impact of mass media. Timely and rich in personal wisdom, Redefining Black Power connects the dots between past freedom struggles and the future of black civic and cultural life in the United States. "Redefining Black Power [was] an important, historical rumination on race, class, power and politics in the Age of Obama. The conversations ...are thoughtful, probing, nuanced insights into the state of African American political power at this historic moment. The book raises challenging questions, but rather than offer definitive answers, it provokes the reader to personally define 'Black power' and inspires all of us to continue the work of 'deepening the meaning of democracy.'" --Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights "Joanne Griffith is a superb journalist! She writes, speaks, and interviews with great skill, sincerity, and sensitivity to those she covers. Joanne has made it in a tough journalism world -- one where the white males, working for wealthy news organizations, have the advantages. Her writings and insights are a lesson to all. She reflects President Obama's spirited call of 'fired up, ready to go!'" --Connie Lawn, Senior White House Correspondent (since 1968) "International broadcast journalist Griffith draws on the archives of radio interviews with black intellectuals to offer a perspective on how the election of the nation's first black president has changed notions of black power and ideas of a multicultural democracy...Griffith provides context for each excerpted interview, adding to the texture of the analysis of changing perspectives on contemporary black power." --Booklist "Griffith concludes by wondering if progressives have been 'lulled into a satisfied slumber' by Obama's election, and whether Dr. King's ambitions have been betrayed by this complacency. Multifaceted discussions regarding the challenges faced by African-Americans during the Obama presidency." --Kirkus Review Joanne Griffith is an award winning international broadcast journalist who has reported, produced and hosted programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio and the Pacifica Radio Network. Joanne has spent her career telling the stories of tragedy and triumph throughout the African Diaspora; from voting rights in the United States, the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, the contribution of immigrants to the United Kingdom and the politics of food and power in southern Africa.

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"Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown's essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock n' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder." --Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth "If Rebecca Brown's talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric -- to a pop standard. An homage -- a menage -- to America, exposing what's laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt." --Van Dyke Parks, Composer/Arranger "Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo beween the Oreo wafers, to the Inquisition, to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats." -- Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: there's a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to today's lurid, inescapable exhibitionism. But whose stories are we telling? This collection of mordant, poignant, and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry, incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots, and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be "American." Fantastical connections and unlikely meetings span the course of America's cultural history in a manic remix, featuring appearances by Brian Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Invisible Man, the Abligensian Crusade, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, JFK, Shane, and God. Rebecca Brown's books include: The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, The Haunted House, Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.

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An Iranian family embroiled in Islamic revolution, the hostage crisis, incest, and exile in America Forced to flee the country with their parents as Khomeini rises to power, Nora and Jahan Ellahi rise to the challenge of anti-Iranian hostility in America. Breaking free from their intense attachment to each other, they explore new relationships to forge independent lives. The romantic artist Jahan ultimately returns to join the army to fight Iraq, while ambitious Nora finds a life of greater opportunity and personal freedom in the U.S. "If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire, then who are we if the object of our desire is forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one world yet long for another? These are just two of the complex and difficult questions Nahid Rachlin explores and ultimately illuminates in this brave, engrossing, and timely novel. I recommend it highly!" -- Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and FogJumping Over Fire is a political novel with a strong dose of Wuthering Heights blended into it ...potent subject matter ..." -- The Seattle Times "Complexities of Iranian culture, recent history, and current events create a vivid background for a moving and suspenseful story...wise and timely novel." -- School Library Journal "As always, Nahid's writing keeps you on the end of your seat and is filled with emotion...The story unfolds with surprise. What makes the book even more meaningful is that it is about a family of meager wealth rather than very affluent. It is a family, however, with complications that arise from their new homeland. Do they survive? That is for you to find out." -- Persian Heritage Magazine "Besides being 'page-turners', Rachlin's novels render, in abundance, the beauty and sensuousness of Persian culture." -- New Letters Nahid Rachlin is the Iranian-American author of the novels Foreigner, The Heart's Desire, Married to a Stranger and the short story collection Veils. She teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.

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In A Cock-Eyed Comedy, Father Trennes is like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a spirit of the age moving through several centuries of Spain’s history. His most recent incarnation is as an Opus Dei religious leader in present-day Spain, whose conformity Goytisolo delightfully savages. A cast of real people and invented characters, including Roland Barthes, Jean Genet, and Manuel Puig, are mixed up in a literary and historical melting pot. A Cock-Eyed Comedy is a transgressive dark comedy with a significant message about religion and sexuality. Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 2004 he was awarded the prestigious Juan Rulfo Award for Literature. His most recent books are State of Siege, The Garden of Secrets, and Landscapes of War.

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The United States is readily distinguishable from other countries, Chief Justice John Marshall opined in 1803, because it is "a nation of laws, not of men." In Perversions of Justice, Ward Churchill takes Marshall at his word, exploring through a series of 11 carefully crafted essays how the U.S. has consistently employed a corrupt from of legalism as a means of establishing colonial control and empire. Along the way, he demonstrates how this "nation of laws" has so completely subverted the law of nations that the current America-dominated international order ends up, like the U.S. -itself, functioning in a manner dia-metrically opposed to the ideals of freedom and democracy it professes to embrace. By tracing the evolution of federal Indian law, Churchill is able to show how the premises set forth therein not only spilled over onto non-Indians in the U.S., but were also adapted for application abroad. The trajectory of America's imperial logic can be followed all the way to the present New World Order in which "what we say goes" at the dawn of the third millennium.

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Chosen as an "Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights in the United States" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. In this volume of incisive essays, Ward Churchill looks at representations of American Indians in literature and film, delineating a history of cultural propaganda that has served to support the continued colonization of Native America. During each phase of the genocide of American Indians, the media has played a critical role in creating easily digestible stereotypes of Indians for popular consumption. Literature about Indians was first written and published in order to provoke and sanctify warfare against them. Later, the focus changed to enlisting public support for "civilizing the savages," stripping them of their culture and assimilating them into the dominant society. Now, in the final stages of cultural genocide, it is the appropriation and stereotyping of Native culture that establishes control over knowledge and truth. The primary means by which this is accomplished is through the powerful publishing and film industries. Whether they are the tragically doomed "noble savages" walking into the sunset of Dances With Wolves or Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan, the exotic mythical Indians constitute no threat to the established order. Literature and art crafted by the dominant culture are an insidious political force, disinforming people who might otherwise develop a clearer understanding of indigenous struggles for justice and freedom. This book is offered to counter that deception, and to move people to take action on issues confronting American Indians today. "One of the most outspoken of current Native American activists, Churchill ...is an amazingly consistent and perceptive writer." --Publishers Weekly "Ward Churchill has long since proven himself to be one of the most eloquent and powerful spokes[people] for American Indian rights." -- Russell Means Ward Churchill has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst of indigenous issues. He is a political activist and an author of numerous books, including A Little Matter of Genocide, Struggle for the Land, and Fantasies of the Master Race.

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These are four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality; Idir's victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker's ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kif, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others but above all with themselves."His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer." —Time"[W]riters and artists such as Williams, Jack Kerouac, Francis Bacon, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to Tangier. . .sought Bowles as an oracle, a writer whose work demonstrated its author as an original who saw farther, deeper, and clearer, and who refused to flinch."--The AustralianPaul Bowles (1910-1999) was an expatriate composer, author, and translator. His other famous literary works include The Sheltering Sky, Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993, and Without Stopping

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Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago.During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her "letters," poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first collection of these poems in his iconic Pocket Poets Series, and di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published "letters" and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020. Published in a board-bound edition that proudly features the original edition's cover art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition:"There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."—Hanif Abdurraqib"What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."—Ken Chen"With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."—Cedar Sigo"How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."—Wendy Trevino

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This bilingual collection of Neruda's most essential poems is indispensable.Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes.An impressive group of translators that includes Alistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems; and a handful of previously untranslated works are included as well.This selection sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre."...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily. "--The Austin Chronicle"This book is a must-have for any reader interested in a definitive sampling of the most essential poems by one whom many consider one of the best poets of the 20th century."--Mike Nobles,Tulsa World"A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again."--Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden"The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it."--The Bloomsbury Review

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An underground denizen of San Francisco soars above it in a state-of-the-art long poem."These poems about San Francisco challenge the media narrative of a city in decline, paying tribute to its joys. Dunagan weaves in allusions to artists, including Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, poets Bill Berkson and Lew Welch, and local landmarks O''Farrell Street and St. Anne of the Sunset."—Publishers WeeklyOver a decade ago, Patrick James Dunagan stoically refused to be published in the Spotlight series, citing his desire to maintain critical independence as a prolific reviewer of contemporary poetry. Finally, he has been prevailed upon to turn over a manuscript, City Bird and Other Poems. Defying the media narrative of the city''s demise, the poems of City Bird celebrate the joys of San Francisco, invoking artists like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, poets like Bill Berkson and Lew Welch, and local landmarks like O'

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Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade. Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries. "Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, "Mind Breaths," presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg...The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called "mind breaths." No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this." --Hayden Carruth, New York Times Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom "Howl" is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."

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The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end."Intelligent, affable and flecked with unconventional typography—as in previous books … Mule Kick Blues is an estimable coda to a storied career."—San Francisco Chronicle"What a beautiful book. … I can’t think of any contemporary artist who explores the interior, the inside-out of the dharma as magically and freely as McClure except maybe for David Lynch. Were they friends?"—Eileen Myles"This legendary rockstar eco-poet’s gemlike modal structures will keep humming while 'black ants circle a bubble of honey.' A final performance from a master poet."—Anne Waldman"These pyramids and lozenges of crystal and light point in all directions and pierce you with the sobbing foghorn lobs of the ever-morphing ripples of the San Andreas Fault Ensemble. Long live McClure and the Libratonic Scales of Interspecies Justice!"—Filip Marinovich"His dedication to the pursuit of liberation in craft and subject matter reveals him to be a powerhouse of wisdom, love, joy. In this book, his ferocity and tenderness intertwine. Here are poems of improvisational intensity. And they are great gifts to us."—Uche NdukaA powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure's life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet's death in May 2020. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence "Death Poems." The book takes its title from an innovative series of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac’s concept of "blues" poems. Featuring shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem "Fragments of Narcissus," and the eco-logical and zen-infused themes for which he is known, Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last sixty years. Introduction by poet Garrett Caples, McClure’s editor at City Lights.

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