Other books that might interest you

• 

  The Matter of Little Losses -...

  Rachel Marie Kang

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Life is full of love, but it is also full of loss. Like paper cuts to the heart, every big and seemingly insignificant loss--the loss of friendships, faith, dreams, health, community, and everything in between--grieves us more than we think it will, and often more than we let on. Why? Because they matter. 
   
  In this compassionate and deeply personal book, Rachel Marie Kang invites you to see and be seen in the midst of your sorrow, your suffering--your story. Through prose and poetry that gives voice to all the things we lose along the way, this gracious book will help you  
   
  · ponder your loss without judgment 
  · remember what was and make meaning of your memories 
  · reflect on what is yet to be as you heal with hope 
   
  You don't have to bury your pain, and you don't have to pretend you're over it just because the world thinks you should be. Let Rachel walk hand in hand with you, giving space for sorrow and welcoming you as you find your way along the path to healing.

  Show book

• 

  Ceremonies in Dark Old Men

  Lonne Elder III

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This classic play by Academy Award nominee Lonne Elder III gives us the portrait of a Harlem family that dreams of a better life, but pursues it in tragic ways. First produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1969, the critically acclaimed Ceremonies in Dark Old Men opened the door for a new generation of African American playwrights, including August Wilson and Lynn Nottage.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Rocky Carroll, Brandon Dirden, Jason Dirden, Julia Pace Mitchell, Charlie Robinson, Glynn Turman and Michole Briana White.Directed by Judyann Elder. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.

  Show book

• 

  Black Words Matter - Poets From...

  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston...

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This anthology focuses on African-American poets.  We start in the 18th century and end with the Harlem Renaissance.  Many poets featured are, and were, rarely heard and have been painfully neglected.  To be of colour was deemed at best to be second class so few of our poets had the privileges most of us take for granted or a means to market. Down the ages they illuminate the stain on our humanity and its ever-repeating cycle.  
  Over ages, eons and countless generations humanity has sought to better itself.  Ideas and cultures have sprung forth creating fertile conditions for change and advancement.  We have gathered together as families, clans, tribes and nations in the clear knowledge that together more can be achieved for the individual.  New systems have evolved, waxed and waned, been replaced or discarded by bright shiny new ones.   
   
  From afar the chances of humanity bettering itself must seem promising.  But today's generations find themselves searching not only for answers from others but also from themselves, for solutions to turn a world where privilege, wealth and power reside with the few to be the right of the many.  These unequal times will not give way easily. Entrenched interests will promise change and deliver little.  This is the real history of the human race.  We will claim that education, health care and jobs are for everyone and yet continue to mis-educate, to ignore primary care and offer jobs that even a robot would think twice about. 
   
  Those oppressed by race, creed, gender or colour will find the invisible walls of the status quo difficult to overcome. But there is hope - if we collectively want action.  When we don’t merely call for that change but when we demand that change from ourselves, and from society.  When we charge our political leaders to serve our interests rather than their own. 
   
  We may be created equal but society, and ourselves, sort, layer and assemble us all into groups, those it can keep underfoot and those who will have an unequal share. Real change requires all of us to change, to recognise that equal opportunity starts from equal access to resources. We need to praise ourselves less and provoke ourselves to do more, together.  If the pain is shared the rewards can be shared. 
   
  This volume does not dwell only on equality but covers a very wide range of subjects from recognised masters of the craft such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Phyllis Wheatley to lesser known poets like Mary E Tucker and Charles Lewis Reason. 
   
   
  The reality is that we are more interested in changing our phones than changing our attitudes and the real changes that will bring.  Both can be done in an instant. In an era of disposable everything we stick rigidly to keeping what we have and yet, bleat that oppression is wrong.  Fair-weather activists. The news cycle will pass.  So does the moment…..until the next time. 
   
  In this collection of poems poets down the ages illuminate the stain on our humanity and its ever-repeating cycle. They call and illustrate the need for change.   
   
  It's an enduring problem that seeks sensible and enduring solutions.   
   
  If it be our will both we and society can change. 
  They call and illustrate the need for change.

  Show book

• 

  Songs from Two Continents - Poems

  Moris Farhi

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Songs from Two Continents is a paean on 'dualities'. Here, Europe and Asia entwine, life and death stalk each other, nationalities fuse and Good and Evil wrestle relentlessly to give meaning to existence. Like such pathfinders as N?zim Hikmet and Orhan Veli before him, Moris Farhi adheres to the ethos of Turkish folk poetry - that poetry should be the pure distillation of emotions. From carnal desire to tender love, from rapture to sorrow and from mysticism to mundanity, he endeavours to expose, in the raw, the essence of our sensibilities. Imbued with the Levantine spirit, Moris Farhi enquires into such themes with his irrepressible sensual verve and passionate intelligence - whether in maturity or in the rambunctious years of youth.

  Show book

• 

  A Sand Book

  Ariana Reines

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A Sand Book is a poetry collection in twelve parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar's "Conference of the Birds" to Chaucer's "Parliament of Fowls" to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.

  Show book

• 

  Indecency

  Justin Phillip Reed

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood. Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

  Show book