Bøker utgitt av Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

A low-income Baltimore neighborhood is targeted for a controversial urban renewal project-an amusement park in the theme of Baltimore itself-that forces its residents to reckon with racism, displacement, and their futures. Peter Cryer is a queer teenager who fantasizes about leaving Baltimore and the instability of his home life while also seeking a place to belong. Ruth Anne, his prickly mother, is terrorized by her estranged husband and the indecision of what to do after the wrecking ball comes through her neighborhood. Thomas, a cleric and History teacher at Peter's school, questions his vocation in the face of the neighborhood's destruction. These three voices braid together a portrait of a neighborhood in flux, the role of community and violence in our time, and the struggles of a very real and oft misunderstood city.

Hell/a Mexican is an appreciation of the tragicomedy that is existing on American soil with foreign roots. These stories shed light on the boundless experience of living and learning through your identity. This collection, much like us, reaches for hope; Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don't.

In her debut poetry chapbook, THE BODY HAS MEMORIES, Adrienne Danyelle Oliver gives voice to being and becoming the whole self. While memory may in its traditional sense be the discoveries of a single individual, Oliver is very aware that the act of remembering is a much greater collective process. It is the historical dialogues among the ancestors and the living. Memories dwell not just within the mind, but are made up from the struggles and triumphs of one's entire existence. Oliver expects her readers to share at least some of her cultural and historical memories. She is well-versed in Hip Hop and in the rich legacy of her African American heritage. She invites us to enter, to embody and to embrace these poems through three very personal portals "the physical, the mental and the heart." Yet no matter where you are in your exploration of this work, you too become aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the body and of the mind, if left on its own. In her poem ": #forareason____," Oliver encourages readers to respond to their own why "she is a limitless being" and welcomes you to a collective affirmation. Oliver is confident in her craft as a poet. In her poem ": belly," she does not let the constraints of form define how she navigates the visual space of the page. Her freedom to explore form enhances the intensity and tension of the language of the body.

In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. California Interest. DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE is an exploration of the divine and the deviant. A consideration of the Black tongue as a home. Life and death through the lense of language. This collection is an ode to the experiences that make us whole and an acknowledgment of those things that fracture us.

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.