The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.

Much has been written about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' heyday in the 1960s and '70s, but the story of their profound, ongoing influence on 21st century social justice movements has until now been left untold. This book unearths this legacy.

This is a emotionally charged tribute to the author's late husband, detailing his life and death as well as his reappearance in various guises. Rooted in the elegance and reality of nature and family, Priscilla Ellsworth's poems become a gift, a primer on 'how to live / and how to die.' In an early poem she chides, 'Husband, wake up!' She is a wife who wants her husband's presence. Life: travel with family, work in the garden with him, the joy of his peonies - 'What if we had lived like this all our days?' Death arrives midway in the book: 'So this is it.' That single line, poignant, direct, straight to the heart. The poem 'Dawn Fire' which follows with its description of hunters and needless death takes one's breath away. In 'New Widow, ' when Ellsworth writes, 'For now my heart is a garden that cannot be turned, ' she keeps us in the rhythm of the natural world: for all its death, it will bring spring. Here are poems to trust."

"An unflinching reckoning with the traumas of one's life and those inherited through a history of exacted injustices "Some men find nothing, and others/ find omens everywhere," writes C. Dale Young in Prometeo, a collection whose speaker is a proverbial "child of fire." In poems that thrive off of their distinct voice, the speaker confronts generational and lived trauma and their relationship to his multi-ethnicity. We are presented with the idea of the past's burial in the body and its constellatory manifestations-both in the speaker and those around him-in disease and pain, but also in strength and a capacity for intimacy with others and nature. Grounded in precise language, Young's examination of the past and its injuries turns into a celebration of the self. In stark, exuberant relief, the speaker proclaims "...I was splendidly blended, genetically engineered/ for survival." Resilient, Young's poems find beauty in landscape, science, and meditation"--

Collection of poetry from Lotus Press. This ground-breaking anthology of poetry contains an informative foreword by the editor, Naomi Long Madgett, which traces the historical influences that have cast so many contemporary African American men in a negative light. The book is divided into eight sections: "Fathers," "Brothers, Sons and Other Youth," "Lovers," "Street Scene," "Beacons," "Music-Makers," "In Light and Shadow," and "In This Sad Place." Each of these section titles is preceded by a group of four portraits drawn by the late Carl Owens. This is an extremely important book that educates its readers, portraying African American men in many positive ways and denying the stereotypical images that too often prevail. The message is not overshadowed by the fine literary quality of the poems by 55 African American women. The title refers to Ifé, a city in Nigeria which, according to legend, was the birthplace of mankind.