Publisher Description

This is our lead title of the season.In early 2021, Tongo was named the 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, which garnered major media coverage and involves high profile public events through 2023. This book will be prominently featured in all settings.Along with Amanda Gorman, Tongo is among a group of younger Black poets now receiving widespread media attention.His social justice and education advocacy for prisoners, at-risk youth, and other vulnerable populations are central to his writing.His reputation and visibility mirror fellow notable poets of color including Hanif Abdurraqib, Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Morgan Parker, Aja Monet, and Eve Ewing.Tongo is well known around the U.S. and beyond since his first book with City Lights, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. (Ben Lerner was a judge for that prize and is a strong advocate of Tongo's work.)Heaven Is All Goodbyes also won a California Book Award, an American Book Award, a PEN Oakland Award, and the NCIBA Award for Poetry from Northern California Independent booksellers.Tongo's profile has grown exponentially. He received praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes from Claudia Rankine, Joshua Bennett, and Nikki Giovanni.Endorsements for Blood on the Fog received from Terrance Hayes, Gerald Horne, Justin Philip Reed, and Kiese Laymon. Sonia Sanchez may provide one, as well.This is Tongo's second book with our press and his second in the Pocket Poets Series, placing him in the vaulted and unusual company of poets like Allen Ginsberg who have more than one volume in the series.Tongo was profiled by the PBS NewsHour and excerpts fromHeaven Is All Goodbyes appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper's. Eisen-Martin is a riveting spoken-word poet, as well as an activist and a charismatic educator.He is in high demand as a performer and speaker, regularly touring, virtually and otherwise, across the U.S.Tongo's recent events included conversations with respected elders Cornel West, Sonia Sanchez, and Gerald Horne, as well as with his contemporary, Hanif Abdurraqib.

Author Biography

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog, his newest collection of poems, is volume 62 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.

Review

2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry - Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance2022 California Book Award FinalistPraise for Blood on the Fog:"Words are not the revolution itself, Eisen-Martin seems to say, and yet this book disturbed me more than any other I read this year. It reminds me that poetry can rewire our thinking—can actually change our minds—by using nothing like the rote language we're so used to hearing in speech and in prose. It can jolt us out of patterns, back into intelligence."—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times"Author of the widely-acclaimed Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Eisen-Martin is the current San Francisco Poet Laureate, and this latest collection bursts with frenetic energy, like an encyclopedia of streets on fire. Lyrics dance and span across the page, and it's easy to imagine Eisen-Martin performing any one of these poems in a Bay Area coffeeshop, tea house, bookstore, or dive bar. The verses are also steeped in social and political conflict, and Eisen-Martin rattles off a list of influential and complex figures, from the Black Jacobins to Joseph McCarthy, the formerly enslaved African-American leader Denmark Vesey, and Shango, a Yoruba deity. Lines reverberate and accumulate over the course of long poems, and nearly every one epitomizes the author's intersectional approach, where class and race and politics collide … Eisen-Martin's collection is militant (without being pedantic), improvisational, and thoroughly captivating."—Booklist"The title of Tongo Eisen-Martin's latest collection, Blood on the Fog, is a spring-loaded phrase that moves from concrete image to political and poetic association with all the force of a jack-in-the-box. And what more, really, could you ask of your poet laureate? … Eisen-Martin's poetry is the kind that people describe as dreamlike and elliptical; it's advanced, nuanced and evocative of its literary forebears."—San Francisco Chronicle"The poems in Blood on the Fog confront race, inequity, and hope with vivid and transcendent language that inspires liberation. Eisen-Martin writes of fury and love and freedom, recalling his experiences traveling through the varied landscapes of America."—Alta Journal"The poems in Blood on the Fog erupt from Tongo Martin-Eisen's revolutionary zeal, but this collection is more than a simple manifesto. While anchored in socialist critique, these poems engage a wide range of political and social issues, including imperialism, racism and white supremacy, and police and the carceral state. … Death, no doubt, is the end point, and if revolution looks forward to anything, it is to that. It's a difficult conclusion, but nothing about these poems is easy. One gets the feeling that any other approach—at least in Martin-Eisen's America—would be grossly disingenuous."—Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books"It's been four years since Tongo Eisen-Martin's feted Heaven Is All Goodbyes, and since then he's become Poet Laureate of San Francisco as well as co-founder of Black Freighter Press. Even without such formal and formidable titles, Eisen-Martin has long spoken for the many souls of that city, in sonically complex and visually unforgettable poems that resist summarization or easy description."—Chicago Review of Books"Maybe we should think of Eisen-Martin as the V. I. Lenin of American poetry. As Lenin remarked, irony and patience are the principal qualities of a revolutionary, and Eisen-Martin has both in abundance."—Rain Taxi"The explosive poetry of San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen Martin exists in a category, nay, dimension all its own. His work is not exactly political poetry as conventionally contrived, since it doesn't bash the reader over the head with obvious polemical intent. Rather, his poems expose the terrifying truths therein by way of jarring juxtapositions and brutally shocking or even humorously coded images. … Indeed, Eisen-Martin is a powerhouse poet whose vivid, scorching satire is humane to the core. He subverts the way that political poetry is presented and calls for a smashing of the state that is so imprisoning for so many."—PopMatters"With uncharacteristic consistency, Eisen-Martin's new poems find themselves crying out to divinities, phantoms, anyone who might alleviate his bewilderment or dread … Still, Eisen-Martin's free-associative temperament and revolutionary politics come through most brilliantly in his sprawling, polyphonic assemblages, which grant equal weight to each line, each full-throated sentiment, each freestanding speaker. … But for Eisen-Martin, face to face with inhumanity, what is always at stake is love, whether for specific people (anonymized, kept safe from scrutiny) or for 'this revolution thing.' In his protests against 'hurricane america,' love is the unspoken subject, the one thing worth preserving within the eye of that storm. But in a handful of brief, caressing improvisations, Eisen-Martin brings love to the fore, concentrating all of his attention, refusing to let anyone interrupt him."—Christopher Spaide, The Sewanee Review"To see San Francisco's eighth poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin read is to get a crash course on how poetry can be a wholly embodied art form. Dynamic and assured, Eisen-Martin inhabits the living, breathing margins of his poems sometimes as a warrior, sometimes as a ghost; sometimes an explosion, sometimes as a wisp of smoke. In his third book, Blood in the Fog, he reveals the layers of a revolutionary experience from the inside out, excavating family histories, fragments of song, Black power and Marxist theory, structural violence and the candor of the street with richly invoked language and intricate form."—KQED"Eisen-Martin writes surreal stanzas merging reality, social justice, and revolutionary bars into a swinging register … His poetic sketches on gentrification, genocide, and local precincts defamiliarize conventional wisdom into post-postmodern testaments 'in increments of eclipse.' These poems go electric, like Hendrix erasing the Mason-Dixon line mapping a new world 'out on this lightning.'"—L.A. Taco"Continuing the lofty tradition of Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Amiri Baraka, Tongo Eisen-Martin has emerged on center stage as today's premier revolutionary poet. A master craftsman and a sensitive artist, he reserves his sledgehammer words for the cruelty of imperialism. He should not only be read—he should be studied."—Gerald Horne, author of The Dawning of the Apocalypse and Moores Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Houston"'Revolution'" appears at least two dozen times in Tongo Eisen-Martin's amazing Blood on the Fog. Find something like a revolving, reiterating locomotion of music riding the rails of thinking and feeling in Blood on the Fog. Find a poetry of 'swinging type body language' where the swinging swings like Ellington and Ali combined, knocking you out inside and out, and turning you around in this extraordinary book."—Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin"In this work that longs for and listens to 'real people … not poem people,' speakers speak of their fear and weakness as matters of fact—what it's like to walk with somebody alive and not what the metaphor of a 'universal' mouthpiece might make of them. This is no precious, immortal-aspirational monologue; no autocrat stone of finality; no poor folks as thought experiments. More fugue than state. More disturbance as the groove. If poems are for anything, I feel like it must be this."—Justin Phillip Reed, author of The Malevolent Volume and Indecency"Blood on the Fog is the illest artifact of time travel I've ever experienced. Tongo Eisen-Martin takes us to a tomorrow and yesterday where we stand—contorted and mangled—but oh so beautiful, faithful and free."—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir"One of the inimitable operations here is to recalibrate the relationship with, Tongo writes, 'streets,' or 'corner' or 'city.' It's a fact, therefore, that the poems stage a wild meta-conversation regarding the presumption that Black people are external to the art being practiced, the art in question. The flat terms of our dying are plainly in need of morphogenesis. Police. Bullet. Prison. I mean: 'Baby, if God doesn't care about what you are writing, it is time to un-die.' Black poetry has got to get its head around the deranged way language and the world expect us to be and live again. Tongo has figured this out, is feeling out how to vein the poem with his own life, and that's why I love his work."—Simone White, author of Dear Angel of Death and Of Being Dispersed"San Francisco Poet Laureate is only a title unless you are willing to fight for a people's freedom. These poems be an archive of survival. These poems be a bridge. And they do the profound work of serving an eclipse of literary measure. Whether speaking rhyme in slant, calling forward Medgar Evers, or the spirituality of an oppressed people, Eisen-Martin offers stanza after stanza as a sunrise. Each poem leads us towards our liberation. This means these poems are heavy in their desire to free our current state of stoic apathy. This means Tongo Eisen-Martin's poetic legacy will live forever."—Mahogany L. Browne, author of Chlorine Sky and I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love"Like Aime Cesaire and Wanda Coleman, Eisen-Martin's poems spark and burst with images that dig deeply into the soil of power and culture, politics and survival, anger and justice. Eisen-Martin's poems feel both fresh and ancient, both powerful and approachable. A perfect addition to the storied City Lights Pocket Poets series."—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA"Tongo Eisen-Martin's Blood on the Fog whirls through our world's 'pile of imperialist failings' in a pulsing, electric rhythm that leaves no room for despair, only for action."—Emma Ramadan, co-owner of Riffraff Bookstore & Bar, Providence, RI"Every revolution needs its poets, and this is the office Eisen-Martin assumes in his latest work. Blood on the Fog services the movement by confronting the plethora of 'imperialist hybrids' produced by a 'carceral state mythology' at once fueled and funded by this nation's 'animated capitalism.' As such, the book is abolitionist in spirit, singing America in its political failings and triumphs alike. Though historically situated, these poems dare to dream toward a cageless world, one where the speakers are free to love as fiercely, and fearlessly, as they rage. An exacting, dynamic, and visionary collection to be regarded alongside other canonical, socially-conscious works."—Serena Morales, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY"To read this collection is to in fact sit in the fog of a low cloud and somehow see a mirror. There are prayers at the heart of these poems that give us permission to yell at God, show him his creation, and demand a revolution. This work is a raucous devotion. It is a gesture toward an ineffable black humanity informed by the ghosts of Ancestors. Tongo Eisen-Martin is chasing the drums of our war songs and demanding rapture—demanding witness—demanding truth."—Christopher J. Greggs, Duende District Bookstore"The polyrhythmic, polyvocal poems in Blood on the Fog have an amazing formal dexterity—sometimes cascading with the momentum of Tongo Eisen-Martin's surreal improvisations, sometimes 'slowing down the poem to the speed of sweet light,' always alive with lyrical and revolutionary fire."—Michael Wendt, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, WI

Promotional

Galleys are available upon requestCo-op is availablePursuing reviews/interviews: American Poetry Review, American Poet, Bookforum, Booklist, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Colorlines, on Democracy Now, Guardian, KQED, LA Review of Books, LA Times, Library Journal, n+1, The Nation, NPR, NY Review of Books, NY Times, PBS NewsHour, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Project Newsletter, Publisher's Weekly, Rain Taxi, The Rumpus, Shelf Awareness, SF Chronicle, Slate, Teen Vogue, and The Washington Post, among other spots.Pursuing excerpts in major publications including The New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, Paris Review, and elsewhere.Pursuing national TV appearances on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" and "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah."Will pursue the San Francisco Public Library's "One City One Book" program, and, in general, utilize the author's increased visibility as San Francisco Poet Laureate.Starting in San Francisco and promoting nationwide, we'll also pursue a #MeetMeAtTheLibrary campaign encouraging the public to explore and embrace their libraries.Promotion via City Lights's popular social media accounts. Tongo is very active on Twitter and Instagram and has large followings on each platformNationwide tour schedule including: City Arts & Lectures (San Francisco); Rain Taxi Twin Cities Book Festival; Brooklyn Book Fest; the Miami Book Fair; the City Lights LIVE virtual events series; Pilsen Community Books (Chicago); and Woodland Pattern Bookstore (Milwaukee).Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements. Will pitch to regional media, including newspapers and radio stationsPursuing author profiles in major venues like The Guardian, Time, CNN, New Yorker, and elsewhere.Pursuing IndieNext bookseller endorsements for Fall 2021. We have interest from Camden Avery (Booksmith, SF), Mitchell Kaplan (Books and Books, Coral Gables, FL), Mandy Medley (Pilsen Community Books, Chicago), Josh Cook (Porter Square, Cambridge, MA), Penelope Bloodworth (Unnameable Books, Brooklyn), Shady Rose (Lost City, Washington, DC), Michael Wendt (Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee), Serena Morales (Books Are Magic, Brooklyn), Angela Spring (Duende District, New Mexico & DC), and John Evans (Diesel, Southern California)

Long Description

This is our lead title of the season. In early 2021, Tongo was named the 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, which garnered major media coverage and involves high profile public events through 2023. This book will be prominently featured in all settings. Along with Amanda Gorman, Tongo is among a group of younger Black poets now receiving widespread media attention. His social justice and education advocacy for prisoners, at-risk youth, and other vulnerable populations are central to his writing. His reputation and visibility mirror fellow notable poets of color including Hanif Abdurraqib, Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Morgan Parker, Aja Monet, and Eve Ewing. Tongo is well known around the U.S. and beyond since his first book with City Lights, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. (Ben Lerner was a judge for that prize and is a strong advocate of Tongo's work.) Heaven Is All Goodbyes also won a California Book Award, an American Book Award, a PEN Oakland Award, and the NCIBA Award for Poetry from Northern California Independent booksellers. Tongo's profile has grown exponentially. He received praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes from Claudia Rankine, Joshua Bennett, and Nikki Giovanni. Endorsements for Blood on the Fog received from Terrance Hayes, Gerald Horne, Justin Philip Reed, and Kiese Laymon. Sonia Sanchez may provide one, as well. This is Tongo's second book with our press and his second in the Pocket Poets Series, placing him in the vaulted and unusual company of poets like Allen Ginsberg who have more than one volume in the series. Tongo was profiled by the PBS NewsHour and excerpts from Heaven Is All Goodbyes appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper's. Eisen-Martin is a riveting spoken-word poet, as well as an activist and a charismatic educator. He is in high demand as a performer and speaker, regularly touring, virtually and otherwise, across the U.S. Tongo's recent events included conversations with respected elders Cornel West, Sonia Sanchez, and Gerald Horne, as well as with his contemporary, Hanif Abdurraqib.

Review Quote

Praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes: "Eisen-Martin''s impeccable collection is a crucial document of this time."--Publishers Weekly,starred review "Eisen-Martin is singing in dark times about dark times. Every poem pops with rightly sad inscrutability"--Chicago Tribune "Tongo Eisen-Martin''s Heaven Is All Goodbyes moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other--keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice. Eisen-Martin''s voice is a chorus of other voices, many arising from prisons and landscapes of engineered poverty; his poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love. This unpredictable volume is equally a work of commitment and of wonder; no false consolation, no settling for despair. Its music makes a clearing in the dominant logic of the day. ''When a drummer is present, he or she is God // I am not an I. / I am a black commons.''"--Griffin Poetry Prizes Judges'' Citation "The tesseraic language of Tongo Eisen-Martin''s Heaven Is All Goodbyes brings a new, shared articulation to the intricacies and interconnections of grief and life, speech and site, state and inhabitant, violence and landscape. Here, polyvocal assemblages gather and revolt against our ''porcelain epoch / succeeding for the most part / dying for the most part / married for the most part to its death.'' This is resistance as sound."--Claudia Rankine "I don''t know that there is a living writer whose work loves Black people as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin''s work loves us. In Heaven Is All Goodbyes, like all of Eisen-Martin''s work, this Black love is not clumsy, easy, sentimental or reliant on spectacle. That Black love lives in the cracked history and ambient future of who we''ve been in the dark, and what''s been done to us in the light. These poems somehow watch and listen without intervening. And when they ask, they ask everything. Heaven Is All Goodbyes makes me want to live, and write, with us forever."--Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division "What a wonderful feeling for life. If we are born--we will die. If we love--we will be rejected. If we are rejected--we will leave. The balance of these poems, one against another, gives us laughter, love and hope. Heaven isn''t goodbye--it''s only the next stop on our heart''s journey."--Nikki Giovanni "Yet again Tongo Eisen-Martin employs his blade-sharp intellect, his wry and piercing wit and unflinching candor to make poems that matter. This collection demands that the reader sees more than themselves--both on the page and in the surrounding world. The poems beg to be read aloud, to be pronounced as spells and incantations, as reports back from communities both known and shrouded. Read this work. Then read it again. Again. Again."--Chinaka Hodge, author of Dated Emcees "This striking new work from Tongo Eisen-Martin is a timely reminder of Amiri Baraka''s call for poems that are useful, poems that breathe like wrestlers. At every turn, Heaven Is All Goodbyes demands that we engage the systemic violence woven into our daily living right alongside the persistent force that is black social life, the joy that everyday people cultivate against unthinkable odds. And even though Eisen-Martin grounds us, necessarily, in the material constraints of the modern world, he doesn''t leave us there. He calls us elsewhere. He brings us with him into a robust, illuminating vision of the worlds that exist outside and underneath the one that seeks to curtail our liberation, contain our love. This is work that challenges as it lifts. These are the unabashed abolitionist lyrics of a writer who knows that stakes are high and so is the cost of conceding our most radical dreams. In a moment marked by cynicism and disenchantment, Eisen-Martin remains a believer: in the commons, in collective struggle, in our capacity to flourish in the midst of what we were never meant to survive."--Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School "Eisen-Martin''s poetry presents a frank and unflinching portrait of the contemporary urban imagination unrelentingly ravaged by social injustice. He serves witness to how prevalent the imbalances of race and power in our society are."--American Poetry Review

Excerpt from Book

"A Good Earth" I talk facing away from the dead They replace me with the change in my pocket A penny that has yet to be invented They say, "You have to know how to cut a throat on the way to cutting a throat" After sleeping on a mattress made from two garbage bags of clothes I became content with the small gestures of plantation fires Playing with couch ashes, I realized how weird the universe was. It exists in so many places. So many random things. It interrupts me when I am trying to dream. Like your clay correspondence, Lord To be transparent I have twenty books next to a bullet Like an old man giving advice at the beginning of a revolution I''ve really done it, Lord. Explored the mumbles of my mind. Explored what''s naturally there. And I found no brainwashing. I found Africa, Lord. I have a future It takes place in the diasporic South I have morning possessions Modern militancy I mean windows to the South I will walk on a missile for food I guess you will not want flowers for a few years, Lord Will I be tied face to face with the country I murder Merge with us, Lord our old metal vs. the new metal our old metal vs. a pool of meandering imperialist faces A multiculturalism of sorts The dead replace me with a comedian''s chest cavity Instead of a chest cavity held tight It takes a violent middle man for me to talk to myself Stories that travel through other people''s stories A song about a song A hemisphere about a hemisphere Stories that travel through a conquered poet My mother remembers Africa, Lord She killed on behalf of you, Lord I wore a machete all winter and no one asked me what it meant I read one thousand books in front of the world What I do is fight poems And sleep through decadent San Francisco prayer circles Watch people play for post-working class associative surfaces Or recreations of a governor''s desk ruling class art of utility Playing find the sociopathic bureaucrat A day white people scare even easier TV in a basket next to a ceramic baby Wearing ceramic armor Musket progeny fantasizing through the art of the poor Their trendy latches locked before God Black art hunted down like a dog Hand over my friends, Lord Lord, I think that I am going to die in a war Unelected white people in my small house Like a blues song of no spiritual affect or dollhouse H-bomb A pony show near dead bodies Apartheid weddings that go right Apartheid white people who give birth to mathematicians The spiritual continuity of barracks and police stations The chemical interpretation of a Sunday trip to church Church smells in their pockets A river mistaken for a talking river No autobiography outside of small personal victories of violence and drug use Made in the image of God''s trinkets What white abolitionists confided in their children about Chemical assurances that They will switch from Black artist to white artist Black God to white God Black worker to white worker I think about you cautiously, Lord In the same way I think about my childhood, Lord Foxhole Friday nights Most of life is mute Comedian points out a planter''s field to the priest King sugar cane King cotton King revolutionary The bottle is central Containing all modes of shallow introduction Introducing an unlisted planter class Speaking about fever and balance sheets And reassuring the masses That we can figure out our fathers later A priest took my mother lightly, Lord Stood in front of the parishioners re-raveling Fantasies about black art Priest reading confidently Before I broke him And broke his parallel After today, I have never been a poet before A little brother watches his big brother''s friends They lean rifles on shelter walls They agree with me and call it literature It''s a simple matter this revolution thing To really lie to no one To keep nothing godlike To write a poem for God "I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money" I go to the railroad tracks And follow them to the station of my enemies A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative All over the united states, there are Toddlers in the rock I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket And why blood agreements mean a lot And why I get shot back at I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway White skin tattooed on my right forearm Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed into a rat-infested manhood My new existence as living graffiti In the kitchen with a lot of gun cylinders to hack up House of God in part No cops in part My body brings down the Christmas The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets Pray over the 28th hour''s next beauty mark Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration the waist band before the next protest poster By the way, Time is not an illusion, your honor I will save your desk for last You are witty, your honor You''re moving money again, your honor It is only raining one thing: non-white cops And prison guard shadows Reminding me of Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise A new lake for a Black Panther Party Malcom X''s ballroom jacket slung over my son''s shoulders The figment of village a noon noose to a new white preacher -All in an abstract painting of a president Bought slavers some time, didn''t it? The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars A cold-blooded study in leg irons Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses That sundown couples made their vows of love over opaque peach plastic and bolt action audiences The Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists My arm changes imperialisms Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums Artless bleeding and the challenge of watching civilians think "terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy" "I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids'' heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests." Modern fans of war What with their t-shirt poems And t-shirt guilt And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus, I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life "The Possibility of Being One Person" I had this dream (planted dead in a weekday) that I was laid up in the hospital. And people kept coming into my room by the dozens. And each dozen had special handshakes for each other and occasionally current dance moves. And they would kick my hospital bed from time to time to let me know that they would be dancing from this hospital room on out to my grave. Strange cha cha''s and soft shoe shuffles. Disco spins. Like they were dancing for a white sundial marking numbness in their feet-drum-race-riot. And I was ready to die, because you know, ask a musician in the tombs after court: It''s the surroundings that is the uniform. ...But I just couldn''t bring myself to visualize against God. One of them stood over me like a conductor waving their arms over my body, directing my heart to beat fainter and fainter. Directing the tubes t

Description for Sales People

This is our lead title of the season. In early 2021, Tongo was named the 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, which garnered major media coverage and involves high profile public events through 2023. This book will be prominently featured in all settings. Along with Amanda Gorman, Tongo is among a group of younger Black poets now receiving widespread media attention. His social justice and education advocacy for prisoners, at-risk youth, and other vulnerable populations are central to his writing. His reputation and visibility mirror fellow notable poets of color including Hanif Abdurraqib, Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Morgan Parker, Aja Monet, and Eve Ewing. Tongo is well known around the U.S. and beyond since his first book with City Lights, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. (Ben Lerner was a judge for that prize and is a strong advocate of Tongo's work.) Heaven Is All Goodbyes also won a California Book Award, an American Book Award, a PEN Oakland Award, and the NCIBA Award for Poetry from Northern California Independent booksellers. Tongo's profile has grown exponentially. He received praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes from Claudia Rankine, Joshua Bennett, and Nikki Giovanni. Endorsements for Blood on the Fog received from Terrance Hayes, Gerald Horne, Justin Philip Reed, and Kiese Laymon. Sonia Sanchez may provide one, as well. This is Tongo's second book with our press and his second in the Pocket Poets Series, placing him in the vaulted and unusual company of poets like Allen Ginsberg who have more than one volume in the series. Tongo was profiled by the PBS NewsHour and excerpts from Heaven Is All Goodbyes appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper's. Eisen-Martin is a riveting spoken-word poet, as well as an activist and a charismatic educator. He is in high demand as a performer and speaker, regularly touring, virtually and otherwise, across the U.S. Tongo's recent events included conversations with respected elders Cornel West, Sonia Sanchez, and Gerald Horne, as well as with his contemporary, Hanif Abdurraqib.

Details