A look at the poetry of one of America’s most populous and fascinating cities, with poems spanning from 1942 to 2012

Being alive in Los Angeles means driving It means having friends in a hundred neighborhoods. Everyday I figure 8 my way through the blood & bones of the city. These journeys invigorate me. Connecting the dots is what I like to do, from the hilltop parties to the Watts Towers, North Long Beach to Frogtown, there's o much flavor-landscape & characters. I love it all. I Am ALIVE IN LOS ANGELES! In this progressive collection of poems. Essays & notes, Mike the PoeT digs into the real Los Angeles. Passages of charged prose & poetic snapshots capture the panorama of the city of angels. Pieces cover the mythical afterhour parties, unique architecture, socioeconomics, graffiti, gangs Hollywood & more. Poet Journalist Historian, Mike Sonksen aka Mike the PoeT has performed at the L.A. Times Book Prizes, Divine Forces Radio, Music Plus TV & published hundreds of poems & articles in the LA. Citybeat, O,C. Weekly, Jointz, Kotori & so on. "It's easy to target Los Angeles' deficits: flashiness, venality, gross disparity of wealth. But is takes rare understanding and eloquence to see this fair city in all its lights, both good and bad. Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the Poet, achieves that unusual feat with his debut spoken-word release, "I Am Alive in Los Angeles!" A third-generation L.A. native Sonksen has special insight into the multi-textured realities that comprise the city."-L.A. Alternative Press "Mike the Poet the most cool, positive guy in poetry, future LA legend you read it here first." -TEKA LARK LO

This book examines the evolution of contemporary American poetry in Los Angeles, California.

Comedian Andrew Heaton's scathing poetry collection about the greater Los Angeles necroplex

This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West’s life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person’s public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake’s aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader’s companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

Named one of Los Angeles Times Book Critic David Ulin's "Top 10 Books of 2015", Wide Awake draws together nationally acclaimed poets and gifted newer writers-one hundred twelve poets of Los Angeles and its surrounding territories-whose work speaks to the humanity, pathos and comedy, of what may be the most romanticized and scorned, disparaged and exalted, of the world's great cities. With respect to style, the selections range from the narrative to the more open-ended or non-sequential, classic formal verse to robust vernacular, and in this way speak to the lively state of North American poetry in our age. Poets include David St. John, Wanda Coleman, Cecilia Woloch, Lynne Thompson, Timothy Steele, Kate Gale, Gail Wronsky, Terry Wolverton, Luis J. Rodriguez, Tony Barnstone, Robin Coste Lewis, William Archila and Melissa Roxas.