Catalog
Born Palestinian, Born Black, by Suheir Hammad (cover photo by Tarek Aylouch)
"It's lucky for us to have this new edition of Born Palestinian, Born Black, Suheir's first book, published more than ten years ago. In the decade since, Hammad has achieved an international reputation as a poet. These poems are the groundswell from which her future work and political commitment springs. Like June Jordan, like Mahmoud Darwish, it is the passion and penchant for lyricism that is the true engine of these poems..."
Kazim Ali, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions)
"Incorporating the density of Spanish surrealism and a sprawling Whitmanesque line, this amazing first book finds Rotando engaged in a poetic biathlon which draws equally from maximal and minimal traditions. There are tight, economical poems, free verse forms derived from the sonnet, poems leaping about the page, but my favorites are the wonderful prose poems tumbling over and under themselves toward gnomish statements that feel both didactic and self-parodying."
Tim Peterson, Since I Moved In (Chax Press)
Theater of War, by Nicholas Powers (cover art by Abdul Powell)
"In this detournement of political statements like the U.S. National Security Strategy Report, a reader will inquire when is "the truth" blurred; conversely, when does Powers' alternative reading come painfully close to the real? The author's hard-hitting, farcical longer-form poems might have constituted a part one, dissolving into the more empathetic, injured fragments. But his choreographed admixture embodies how emotions come. Anger interspersed with hurt; a loudly reinterpreted official voice, broken by still louder whispers."
Bruna Mori, Derive (Meritage Press)