Black Indian

Black Indian
Author: Shonda Buchanan
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2019-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0814345816

A moving memoir exploring one family’s legacy of African Americans with American Indian roots. Finalist, 2024 American Legacy Book Awards, Autobiography/Memoir Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony—only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance. Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe—a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed—and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins. Black Indiandoesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go—sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate with anyone who has wondered "maybe there's more than what I'm being told."

The Slant Hug O' Time

The Slant Hug O' Time
Author: George Drury Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN: 9780984005819

The iconic founder of the "Beyond Baroque" magazine and Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California, crafts an amazing alternate-history tale of invention, corporate control, and hidden agendas, all told through his "tour-de-force" wordsmithing.

Wide Awake

Wide Awake
Author: Suzanne Lummis
Publisher: Pacific Coast Poetry
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781892184030

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.

Lost and Local

Lost and Local
Author: Carol Ellis
Publisher: Pacific Coast Poetry
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781892184269

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Edited by Suzanne Lummis. Leaving the theater I stand outside in a dark of black lipstick the world wears when everyone leaves. Language like this--savory, sensuous and ripe with the unexpected--is among Carol Ellis' strengths, along with an intelligence that converts the ordinary into the wild and the strange. They pour from her, these poems, not in the form of stories exactly, narrative, but in a profusion of responses to the world, the seen, the experienced and the imagined. Thunder. The dogs bark. The gods are angry say those who believe in gods. The gods are always angry or out in the back alley by the dumpster smoking a cigarette. Reader, think of Carol Ellis' poems this way: like stepping into the realm of dreams, but dreams wittier and more sumptuous than those that favor most of us each night.

Hold-Outs

Hold-Outs
Author: Bill Mohr
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609380738

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

Holy Barbarians

Holy Barbarians
Author: Lawrence Lipton
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786256207

Mr. Lipton’s book is the first complete and unbiased survey of the beat generation and its role in our society. Here are the intimate facts about these people and their attitudes toward sex, dope, jazz, art, religion, parents, landlords, employers, politicians, draft boards, the law and, most important, toward the “square”. The author presents a picture of their way of life, their individual backgrounds, the language they have appropriated, in terms made clear for the first time to those of us who have been confused and puzzled about them. He also provides a balanced discussion of their literature, art and music, of what they produce and fail to produce in the arts they practice.—Print Ed.

Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World

Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World
Author: Ed Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781885983671

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet--widely available for the first time. In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith's work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely "cry for civilization," "Return to Lesbos" put down that gun / stop electing Presidents. Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like "Fishing" This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line. Ed's vibrant "gang" of writer and artist friends--among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad--congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA's west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others' work. Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life. Ed Smith's poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This "punk Dorothy Parker" is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

Book of the Other: Small in Comparison

Book of the Other: Small in Comparison
Author: Truong Tran
Publisher: Kaya Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781885030757

A furious, multiform examination of the devastation wrought by anti-Asian racism in America Truong Tran's provocative collection of poetry, prose and essays is a stunning rebuttal to the idea of anti-Asian racism as a victimless crime. Written with a compulsion for lucidity that transforms outrage into clarity, Book of the Other resists the luxury of metaphor to write about the experience of being shut out, shut down and othered as a queer, working-class teacher, immigrant and refugee. What emerges from Tran's sharp-eyed experiments in language and form is an achingly beautiful acknowledgment of the estrangement from self forced upon those seduced by the promise of color-blind acceptance and the rigorous, step by step act of recollection needed to find one's way home to oneself. Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1969. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words and 100 words (coauthored with Damon Potter). He also authored the children's book Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant to Say Please Pass the Sugar. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Tran lives in San Francisco where he teaches art and poetry.

People Tools

People Tools
Author: Alan C. Fox
Publisher: Select Books (NY)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781590791424

"Author presents strategies people can employ to build and strengthen the personal relationships he believes are the hallmarks of a successful career and enjoyable life"--