""Welcome to the 21st Century"" bids the opening line of this literary ""multimedia"" experience, brought to us by three leading Black author-activists of the post-Civil Rights Movement generation. This collection of more than 300 poems, essays, paintings, photos, and mixed media representations features myriad voices of the generation bridging the gap between the children of the Civil Rights Movement and those of the present hip hop movement.

Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art

Literature & Fiction

Bashir, Samiya

Medina, Tony

Lansana, Quraysh Ali

United States

THIRD WORLD PRESS +

Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. WHERE THE APPLE FALLS resides at the intersections between woman and female—both human and environmental—and the concepts to which she is often linked: death, rebirth, victim, sexual/perverse. Seasons are crucial: from the birth of Spring through Autumn's final harvest, the work suggests a recasting of the farmer; a reclamation of both the fall and redemption/death/(re)birth on her own terms. Finally, WHERE THE APPLE FALLS highlights the resilience of strength. Even strength denied does not die. Instead, it continues to grow in power, waiting for its calling. WHERE THE APPLE FALLS reminds us to imagine, encourages us to answer the call, to revel in the beauty and possibility that we all embody, to consider our direction and route. "In her debut collection WHERE THE APPLE FALLS, Samiya Bashir demands we listen and hear the symphony of stories that 'sail on the ochre cushion of these moonlit poems.' In 'Moon Cycling,' she writes: 'Don't come by my door/ Smellin' fresh like that/ Sizzling like summer/ Steak medium rare/ I'll think you are/ My supper.' But she opens the door and her words and images grab us and never let go. She challenges ideas of edginess, religion, beauty, sexuality and imagination. Bashir's language is vivid and compelling in lines like 'Crooked back bowed into the new black moon.' There's remarkable womanness, vulnerability, pain and insight in these lines…WHERE THE APPLE FALLS can at times be a difficult read, as many poems are dense and complex. But here is a new and provocative voice comfortable in the skin of her poems, secure in her poetic vision." —Black Issues Book Review "Bashir's first book of poems is a moving blend of personal narrative and lyric grace. Poems that deal with the legacy of slavery are haunting, such as the intimacy and danger in 'Floating Down the Delaware': 'Black skin rots cerulean blue. The/ two bodies were found on Thursday/ night. No wonder I can't keep track/ of time.' Bashir's finely crafted lines touch on migration, faith, urban life and the lives of women, never letting their reach slacken." —Curve Magazine "[E]xpand[s] the range of questions American poetry can and should ask. Bashir zooms in on exquisite details—from childhood rituals to her lover's lips—then her topics explode outward as she grapples with war, violence against women, and the legacy of slavery. A tendency to make lists sometimes dilutes Bashir's voice, but overall, her writing is precise with rage, intelligence, and tenderness shimmering through." —Girlfriends Magazine

Where the Apple Falls

Poetry

RedBone Press

Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Lambda Literary Award finalist. GOSPEL is an ecumenical resistance song in four parts. In this passionate follow-up to 2005's Lambda Literary Award finalist, WHERE THE APPLE FALLS, Bashir's poems challenge truth to stare down the power of fear and paralysis. "We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down- trodden," said gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey. "This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel." The good news, according to Bashir, is that we are neither alone in our mess, nor alone in our grasp of the tools to heal. In this pull-no-punches collection Bashir lays down a road map, a portable flashlight, and a shaky-legged escort to usher the way toward recovered sight and strength. "'How is it done— / remolding body into / image of body,' writes Samiya Bashir in the poem 'Topographic Shifts,' from her latest book, GOSPEL (RedBone Press, 2009). The poem describes an amputation performed on a baby girl born with twelve fingers and toes, but these lines make me think, of course, about the pressure so many women feel to alter our bodies: how the 'image of [the idealized] body' worries, haunts, maims. What I love about Bashir's work is how her poems work against this enforced correcting. Many of her poems thrum with the erotic joy of queer black bodies, and her work celebrates the lived experiences of bodies that resist 'remolding.'"—The Kenyon Review "Bashir gathers stories and language from a range of cultural locations and weaves them into the imagistic and sonic qualities of the poems. The Norse gods make a dramatic and cacophonous appearance and, in one of her most effective rhetorical moves, Bashir utilizes a Ghanian call and response sequence that both effectively heightens the drama and energy in the poem and then brings it to rest at its conclusion. The poems of GOSPEL are rife with layered meanings while they immerse the reader in a landscape that is both familiar and reassuring as well as deeply unfamiliar and strange."—Lambda Book Report "Gospel music, like its secular cousin the blues, never wallows in pity, but instead seeks to transcend pain and reach glory. Bashir's book makes the same trip.it's the word's original meaning that I think Bashir best exemplifies in this book—good story or message—because GOSPEL is, at heart, a collection of poems that suggest we are not alone in this mess of a world."—The Rumpus

Gospel: Poems

These poems span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints. Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder's chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody's idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies. Albert Murray said, "the second law of thermodynamics ain't nothing but the blues." So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world? Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love and intent, identity and hybridity, and how we embody these interstices and for what reasons and to what ends.

Field Theories

Nightboat Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bashir, Samiya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bashir, Samiya

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bashir, Samiya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art

Where the Apple Falls

Gospel: Poems

Field Theories