Bücher veröffentlicht von BLACK LAWRENCE PR

American Scapegoat is a book of painstakingly honest and chilling poems about America's neglectful relationship with its own history. At the core of this reluctance to frame the past in its proper context is the fraudulent and fraught mythology that Black people are what America needs to be protected from. This extremely damaging narrative has been prominently embedded within the socio-political framework of American culture and continues to play an inescapably significant role in the Black experience in America. This timely collection looks both to the past and the future, and fosters a deeply essential conversation about what it means to be Black and American in a democracy at war with itself and its humanity."In America, choice's always an illusion. And it always comes back to having to answer questions for which my body is never prepared."Through his own distinctive path, Enzo Silon Surin bears witness to the complexities of the Black experience in America. These poems examine the hard edges and paradoxes as a way of illuminating them as he grapples with violence, injustice, masculinity, intimacy, and fatherhood. How does one locate themselves in this American landscape? American Scapegoat is a remarkable testament to the power of language, marked with intensity, radiance, and hope."-January Gill O'Neil"The poems in American Scapegoat are not for the faint of heart. Wrapped masterfully in poetry's artful tongue, they do not seek absolution nor do they apologize as the collection indicts American racism and its bloated, systemic injustices. Heightening the reader's experience with a surgically precise interrogation of form in poems like "American Lexicon," "Prelude," and "American Witness," Enzo Silon Surin writes against our fears and shines bright the hope we dare have for our sons."-Frank X WalkerPoetry. Family & Relationships. African & African American Studies.

Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series SelectionIn The Book of Redacted Paintings, the narrative arc follows a boy in search of his father's painting, but it is unclear whether the painting exists or not. The book, a poetry collection, is also populated by a series of paintings. Some are real, incomplete, and/or missing, while most are redacted from reality. The withdrawn paintings concept is the emotional arc of the book, a combination of wishing one could paint the pieces he/she/they envision and the feeling of something torn out of a person due to a traumatic upbringing. A sort of erasure ekphrasis, to foresee artwork that was never painted."Formally various, narratively propulsive, and relentlessly earnest in its psychospiritual excavations, Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a sincere achievement. That it represents the author's first full-length collection makes it even more remarkable. In one poem, the sound of gunfire "splits the wind in half." In another, "It rains, as if heaven crashes, it rains." Kayzakian's are poems of real stakes and scale, of the minute and the hour and the lifetime. His subjects-art, family, masculinity, empire-remain as timely as ever, but it's the uncanny juxtapositions of lyric and visual art that make The Book of Redacted Paintings an unforgettable text."-Kaveh Akbar, Author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and The Pilgrim Bell"In his poignant and devastating debut collection, Arthur Kayzakian skillfully excavates personal memory and family history to reclaim a missing heirloom. Through poems ranging in documentary, to visual, to lyrical, Kayzakian confronts how the grief of war and displacement are compounded by the loss of stolen familial objects, beloved items that served as a reminder of the life before. Where the harms of war are intensified by new harms, these poems push against historical erasure to establish a new narrative. Kayzakian stirs with poetic prowess while achieving generational reclamation."-Mai Der Vang, Author of Yellow Rain"I love Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings for its lyricism and its honestly which comes at us not directly but by way of images and music and always speaks in tongues in a way that alerts and awakens. There is both hunger and wisdom in these poems, both silence inside the singing and the fresh music out of rooms that might have been silenced once. Not any more! The new, original, inimitable poet is in the room. Kayzakian deserves our warmest welcome."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa"Arthur Kazakyan's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a deft and daring first collection. It's also one of the best examples I've seen of a narrative sustained from poem to poem without sacrificing momentum. Constantly surprising, this gallery of moments is exquisitely curated; you will want to linger here. Themes of love, heritage, wonder, and the life of the artist are embodied in strokes that always seem fresh, still drying. "Forgive me collector," he says, "I'm trying to get back to my world." Follow this exhibition, it's on the move."-Brendan Constantine, Author of Dementia, My DarlingPoetry. Middle Eastern Studies.

Michal "MJ" Jones' debut Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling - an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: "We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust." The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, & bringing back "rainbow soap colors". It is a book of passing - as, through, and on. Hop on in.

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Always a Relic Never a Reliquary, Brazilian American poet, editor and abolitionist Kim Sousa interrogates inheritance by reaching both backwards and forwards: backwards towards her father's first border crossing and forwards past her own. Centered around a specific personal trauma, a later-term miscarriage, the poems also contain collective trauma: they ask what it means to live in the United States both as immigrant and citizen, addressing State terror and violence as if by megaphone at the protest line. In Sousa's poems, the personal is political: they are anti-racist, ecocritical and proletariat. She sings diasporic resilience as both a horror and celebration. The poems are haunted but hopeful; here, there is always hope in rage and resistance.

Poetry. "Here are poems about papa and place. Poems about family history. Poems that rise from the casket with memories. The rooster turns its head to listen. There is something Dominican that is captured in the beak of each word as this woman moves among her people. She brings lines that are lush and filled with reminders. Yes -- 'Someone has set the cat among the pigeons.'"--E. Ethelbert Miller "The gods have bestowed a blessing on us in this radiant debut collection, LOVE LETTER TO AN AFTERLIFE. Above all else, these poems speak profoundly about survival and preservation of self and family, of language and culture, of memory and identity. These poems put in work, emboldening the many millions of us in the African diaspora in our determination to be, endure, and thrive in the new world. Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, we sing your name."--Jeffery Renard Allen