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Takara delivers an inspiring parapsychological philosophy readers will want to share with others. We all struggle to overcome life's inevitable sufferings. Answering that challenge, Takara paves creative paths to transformational self-actualization. Flying across time and space, swimming through instructive deserts and gratefully quenching our souls at oases, we can unite with one another and with every entity in our beloved universe.In Footprints Wings Phantasms, Takara shares her understanding that profound wisdom arises from experiencing transformative journeys along an elemental path to awakening. This book is a response to a deeply philosophical collection of poems, The Desert Swimmer, by Peter Dong Feng, PhD, a poet and professor at the University of Qingdao in China, where Takara gave lectures for seven summers. Feng's metaphors inspired her to create these reflective poems.Everyone celebrates their high points and successes, but those in the process of awakening can also appreciate the right questions, efforts, and even failures, by stepping back, observing, accepting, and learning to fly. Due to hereditary and environmental tendenciesand the force of changewe have the capacity for whole creativity, but we live in a waking sleep amid shifting dimensions of confusion.A new era is emerging. We have begun to recognize the potential of awakening. We are learning how individuals unite with the collective consciousness of energy exchanges. Surpassing both the self-centered ';I love you' and the simply united yet inert ';I am you,' through process philosophy, we can envision possibilities: traveling via paranormal non-locality; becoming others; and discovering infinity, the universal song of balance.Taking a leap of faith up into the often unobserved skies of subjectivity-plus-objectivity, Takara seeks to present to people of all ages possibilities inherent in awakening. Each person must discover and develop constructive intentions. She affirms the creative balance among the forces of yin passivity, yang activity, and the transcendent third force. Recognizing phantasms, her poems explore metaphors like carefully walking, fearlessly flying, and falling into experiences.Footprints Wings Phantasms challenges readers to be attentive to experiences. Transformation requires learning the value of ';knowing thyself.' Ever yearning to understand the great mysteries, Takara works to attain greater awareness of self and community. She aims to facilitate peaceful relations, by exploring the process of juggling the natural forces of naked freedom.Awareness and detachment open possibilities for new ways of being. Through suffering, we can know the true joy of healing. As described by the mystic San Juan de la Cruz, in ';the dark night,' the soul travels through the influence of grace and undergoes purification of senses and spirit, before ascending the ladder of transformation. As we climb, knowledge and humility move us closer to enlightenment.This collection tests traditional poetic boundaries by emphasizing a type of lyricism with hidden narratives about practice and process. The individual learns how to observe, direct, and accept change. Standing still does not result in growth. Readers are invited to fearlessly take flight--exploring organic life, self's shortcomings, and Natures magical dance.

The idea for this collection, Sisters Across Oceans, was inspired by the much needed conversation between influential Black women across the diaspora. Under the direction of poet-activist Karla Brundage, founder of West Oakland to West Africa (WO2WA) and editor of a previous production of a similar exchange, and a notable book of poetry, Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, she expanded her original vision of connectivity across the African Diaspora to Hawaii. In collaboration with the Links Inc., Hawaii Chapter and Ehalakasa, West Oakland to West Africa, hosted an eight-week poetry exchange between women in Hawaii, California, and Ghana. Using the renshi form, where each poem was started by the line of the poem previously received by the poet partners, the poets respond to each other's thoughts. This is why the book is ordered in pairs, such that each chapter reflects a paired exchange based on specific themes.

With style reminiscent of his influences- Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni and Tupac- Donté Clark was named Richmond Poet Laureate for a reason. He is one of the RAW (Richmond Artist and Writers) griots of Richmond, capturing the deep fear, thick joy and every day rhythms of his city, from the old men on the stoop to the boys gathering with their cousins on the corner to their mommas waiting for their babies to come home safe. In "Close Caskets," Donté brings language to the complex trauma of growing up consistently losing loved ones to gun violence while also navigating systemic oppression- he teaches us that "under poverty is a ceiling" and "beneath the boy is hunger." But despite all of the triggers that could lead him to thirst for vengeance, Donté continues to choose life. To choose love. He continues to craft a counter-narrative of resilience and rebirth, breaking cycles of generational trauma, healing himself and readers alike through his powerful storytelling. Donté paints hilarious and heartbreaking portraits of his family and takes us on a tour of his neighborhood, mapping his emotional landscape and memorializing all of his loved ones taken too soon. With this collection, they are inked into our collective memory forever. As one of his fallen friends once prophesied, "keep doin'' you, you might be the one that saves lives. Molly Raynor

Collaborative anthology of poetry between West Oakland and West African poets using Renshi style.

In Red Dreams, Volcano Visions, award-winning author, Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD, presents contemporary ecological and environment issues in a context of a volcanic eruption. Her aim is to elevate the consciousness from a moral desert of conscience and caring to a level of awareness to transform the abuse of magnificent Nature to another level of respect for life, sustenance, and a healing of the earth.In her poetry, Takara includes Hawaiian mythology, startling photos, disquieting red lava flows and the daily community losses of land, homes, and livelihood. Some speculate that the destruction was caused by ignorance, irreverence for the sacred land and its power, and the greed of the developers who sold land on a high risk rift zone.Takara likewise illuminates the reader about Hawai`i and its people, Kanaka Maole, their spiritual traditions, history, continuing reverence for Nature, and the significance of the ancestral memories, legends, and myths on contemporary culture and life styles.Takara's subtext is a commentary on the climate crisis and dire situation and conditions of our earth. She observes the relationship between man and Nature and the unpredictable and predictable consequences of abuse. She includes philosophical and metaphysical questions of identity, conscience and transformation.She witnesses the neo-colonial and colonial geologies and geographies of resistance and the psychological effects of loss and restoration in a social context of race, class, and culture. Her message: we must get right with the earth.

Njoroge Njoroge, PhD and professor of History, University of Hawaii writes, "In these times of chaos we need, we must, have voices cast out to pull us back together...That's what makes the work of Kathryn Takara so powerful." In critical and compassionate word pictures, Kathryn Takara captures in poetry and selected photos that enhance the power of poetry, the political legacy of a brutal colonial history of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and a tenacious people's struggle for a return to democracy, political power, self-determination, and a dignified survival long after a promised representative government and democracy have failed. However, the reader is left with a feeling of compassion for the people of Zimbabwe who seem to be supported by a spiritual optimism, hope, faith and their ability to laugh even as they cry.

African American attorneys have a lively, colorful history from Justice Thurgood Marshall to President Barack Obama, both of whom have ties to Hawaii. Barbee-Wooten tells the little known stories of some of those attorneys who broke barriers and made their impact on Hawaii's legal landscape, leaving the door open for many more to be told.