Blues Divine is at heart an ancestral mixtape and tribute. These poems have been creative salvations, signposts, people's history and testimonies. Inside is a journey of many intersections and switchbacks, fast running rivers and swamplands, as well as those sacred places where sun splits the sky wide open. Born into a crossing over place where Indigenous met African met Texan met Alaskan Native, sat down in a pre-Stonewall gay bar and discussed shadows and recovery...left home age ten and been looking ever since...sang and sang again...rambled on...and still underway. "Everything about Storme Webber signifies something. Her writing signifies lost words re-discovered, re-birthed, and given new meaning. Her voice signifies the memories of our mothers and grandmothers - and their mothers. It signifies both the calmness and tempestuousness of primordial waters. Storme's very presence signifies the global 'we'. The 'we' of this planet whose roots run deep into the earth, who have tended the earth, ever since Sky-woman was lowered onto the turtle's back. Storme signifies this. She signifies the we-womyn-who-love-womyn-who-live-womyn-centered-lives, politically, personally, spiritually... at times vulnerably, at times fearlessly, but always honestly. Storme Webber signifies the consummate artist/priestess. When you witness her center-stage, or hear her recordings, you witness more than performance, you witness ritual. " Sha'Ifa Mami Watu, Hiphop Haijin/Lyricist-the Legacy trio

How can we use the experience of darkness to lift our spirits, challenge our hearts and minds and draw us closer into the heart of God?

Bijoy is a young boy in a remote Bangladeshi village, where the legacy of hardship is passed from generation to generation. But a distinct dream has been handed to this little soul by his father: Bijoy will break the cycle of poverty through education. His tiny heart embraces the dream without knowing the price he will endure for this vision. Inevitably, every triumph comes with a price. But Bijoy didn't accept this cost as a choice; he followed it as it was the only means to escape. When every door closes, Bijoy and his mother must embark on the unknown. At every turn, Bijoy is both aided and puzzled by the mysterious plots of destiny. Where will this hostile journey steer Bijoy? What is adversity striving to profess? Spanning two continents and several decades, Bijoy’s dramatic journey captivates the reader through each twist and turn as he deals with poverty, danger, oppression, unusual breakthroughs, and love and gains precious wisdom on life along the way. Ultimately, his greatest struggle is an existential one: finding peace with the hand life dealt him.

In this volume, Richard Creel sets forth a thesis that offers a third way to approach divine impassibility. Defining impassibility as imperviousness to causal influence from external factors, Creel sketches a path between Aquinas and Hartshorne, by asserting that once this definition is accepted, one must still distinguish the various respects in which God is or is not impassible. Virtually no one would dispute that the divine nature is impassible. God will never cease to be God, no matter what happens in creation. With respect to the divine knowledge and will, however, there are conflicting views. Creel claims that God's will is impassible because God knows everything that can be accomplished by divine power. Yet, unlike Aquinas, Creel believes that God has this knowledge in virtue of a 'plenum' of possibilities eternally coexistent with the divine being. The absolute is not simply God, but rather God plus the 'plenum'. Creel suggests that God's knowledge is passible with respect to the contingent future actions of creatures. God knows these actions, therefore, not in their presentiality from all eternity, as Aquinas would hold, but only as they happen and become actual. God's will, however, remains immediately impassible because the divine will is ordered to possibilities, not actualities. God never has to wait until after we do something in order to decide his response to it. He has eternally decided his response to all that we might do. Ultimately God's feelings remain impassible, no matter what concrete decisions human beings make, because the basic intent of the divine plan for us is always achieved: we exercise our freedom to choose for or against God. God is impassible with respect to the divine nature, divine will, and divine feelings; but God is passible with respect to the divine knowledge of future contingent events.

The Great Migration was the most significant event in black life since emancipation and Reconstruction. Passionately Human, No Less Divine analyzes the various ways black southerners transformed African American religion in Chicago during their Great Migration northward. A work of religious, urban, and social history, it is the first book-length analysis of the new religious practices and traditions in Chicago that were stimulated by migration and urbanization. The book illustrates how the migration launched a new sacred order among blacks in the city that reflected aspects of both Southern black religion and modern city life. This new sacred order was also largely female as African American women constituted more than 70 percent of the membership in most black Protestant churches. Ultimately, Wallace Best demonstrates how black southerners imparted a folk religious sensibility to Chicago's black churches. In doing so, they ironically recast conceptions of modern, urban African American religion in terms that signified the rural past. In the same way that working class cultural idioms such as jazz and the blues emerged in the secular arena as a means to represent black modernity, he says, African American religion in Chicago, with its negotiation between the past, the present, rural and urban, revealed African American religion in modern form.

From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry. “Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York Times Against the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today. Praise for Divine Blue Light: "Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation "These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly "The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light "Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter