5th year annniversary edition of Dryland, a literary journal born in South Central Los Angeles. Featuring poets and writers Tongo Eisen-Martin, Barbara Jane Reyes, Eva Recinos, and more.

Dryland: A Literary Journal Born in South Central Los Angeles

Eisen-Martin, Tongo

Padilla, Viva

Recinos, Eva

Ponte Las Pilas Press

Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize
2018 American Book Award Winner
2018 PEN Oakland Award Winner
Winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry
2018 NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year
"Eisen-Martin's impeccable collection is a crucial document of this time."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
This is truly revolutionary poetry. A vortex of images, observations, inspired leaps and free associations spills forth from a choir living in oppression and transience. Moments of political and spiritual convergence, surrealism and blunt materiality, gangsterism and its husk, revolution and perseverance, are captured in the music of metaphor and pure intention.
Praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes:
"The tesseraic language of Tongo Eisen Martin's Heaven Is All Goodbyes brings a new, shared articulation to the intricacies and interconnections of grief and life, speech and site, state and inhabitant, violence and landscape. Here, polyvocal assemblages gather and revolt against our 'porcelain epoch / succeeding for the most part / dying for the most part / married for the most part to its death.' This is resistance as sound."—Claudia Rankine
"I don't know that there is a living writer whose work loves Black people as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin's work loves us. In Heaven Is All Goodbyes, like all of Eisen-Martin's work, this Black love is not clumsy, easy, sentimental or reliant on spectacle. That Black love lives in the cracked history and ambient future of who we've been in dark, and what's been done to us in the light. These poems somehow watch and listen without intervening. And when they ask, they ask everything. Heaven Is All Goodbyes makes me want to live, and write, with us forever."—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
"What a wonderful feeling for life. If we are born—we will die. If we love—we will be rejected. If we are rejected—we will leave. The balance of these poems, one against another, gives us laughter, love and hope. Heaven isn't Goodbye—its only the next stop on our heart’s journey.”—Nikki Giovanni
"Yet again Tongo Eisen-Martin employs his blade sharp intellect, his wry and piercing wit and unflinching candor to make poems that matter. This collection demands that the reader sees more than themselves—both on the page and in the surrounding world. The poems beg to be read aloud, to be pronounced as spells and incantations, as report backs from communities both known and shrouded. Read this work. Then read it again. Again. Again."—Chinaka Hodge, author of Dated Emcees
"This striking new work from Tongo Eisen-Martin is a timely reminder of Amiri Baraka's call for poems that are useful, poems that breathe like wrestlers. At every turn, Heaven Is All Goodbyes demands that we engage the systemic violence woven into our daily living right alongside the persistent force that is black social life, the joy that everyday people cultivate against unthinkable odds. And even though Eisen-Martin grounds us, necessarily, in the material constraints of the modern world, he doesn’t leave us there. He calls us elsewhere. He brings us with him into a robust, illuminating vision of the worlds that exist outside and underneath the one that seeks to curtail our liberation, contain our love. This is work that challenges as it lifts. These are the unabashed abolitionist lyrics of a writer who knows that stakes are high and so is the cost of conceding our most radical dreams. In a moment marked by cynicism and disenchantment, Eisen-Martin remains a believer: in the commons, in collective struggle, in our capacity to flourish in the midst of what we were never meant to survive."—Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School

Heaven Is All Goodbyes: Pocket Poets No. 61 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, 61)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

Politically astute, filled with wisdom and great humanity, this is poetry meant to conjure a healing and provoke a confrontation, an invitation to a journey through Black America. "Words are not the revolution itself, Eisen-Martin seems to say, and yet this book disturbed me more than any other I read this year. It reminds me that poetry can rewire our thinking--can actually change our minds--by using nothing like the rote language we're so used to hearing in speech and in prose. It can jolt us out of patterns, back into intelligence."--The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2021" A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet's sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate anytowns. Radical, outraged, knowing, wry, and deeply humane, these are poems of survival that soar with a vision of collective liberation. 2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry - Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance Praise for Blood on the Fog: "Continuing the lofty tradition of Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Amiri Baraka, Tongo Eisen-Martin has emerged on center stage as today's premier revolutionary poet. A master craftsman and a sensitive artist, he reserves his sledgehammer words for the cruelty of imperialism. He should not only be read--he should be studied."--Gerald Horne "In Blood on the Fog, find a poetry of 'swinging type body language' where the swinging swings like Ellington and Ali combined, knocking you out inside and out, and turning you around in this extraordinary book."--Terrance Hayes "Black poetry has got to get its head around the deranged way language and the world expect us to be and live again. Tongo has figured this out, is feeling out how to vein the poem with his own life, and that's why I love his work."--Simone White "This is no precious, immortal-aspirational monologue; no autocrat stone of finality; no poor folks as thought experiments. More fugue than state. More disturbance as the groove. If poems are for anything, I feel like it must be this."--Justin Phillip Reed "Blood on the Fog is the illest artifact of time travel I've ever experienced. Tongo Eisen-Martin takes us to a tomorrow and yesterday where we stand--contorted and mangled--but oh so beautiful, faithful and free."--Kiese Laymon "Whether speaking rhyme in slant, calling forward Medgar Evers, or the spirituality of an oppressed people, Eisen-Martin offers stanza after stanza as a sunrise. Each poem leads us towards our liberation. This means these poems are heavy in their desire to free our current state of stoic apathy. This means Tongo Eisen-Martin's poetic legacy will live forever."--Mahogany L. Browne

Blood on the Fog: Pocket Poets Series No. 62 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, 62)

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, an exhibition space and research institute in San Francisco, dedicates year-long seasons of discussions and public events to a single artist. In 2016–17, the American artist David Hammons (born 1943) was "on our mind." The book begins with the previously unpublished transcript of a rare artist talk given by Hammons in 1994 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the occasion of his exhibition there. It then introduces a series of photographs the artist sent to the Wattis Institute in 2017, interspersed with texts by the Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and the writer and critic Fred Moten. Much like Hammons’ work, this publication raises more questions than it answers. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive introduction to the artist, David Hammons Is on Our Mind offers visual and textual elements that relate obliquely to the enigmatic artist’s oeuvre.

David Hammons Is on Our Mind (CC WATTIS ICA)

Arts & Photography

Moten, Fred

HAMMONS, DAVID

History & Criticism

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

Poetry. African American Studies. "Eisen-Martin's syntax lands somewhere between Sphinx and Thelonious…through poem he makes spare, efficient, wild-eyed jazz…rubs mud and accountability into the pores of the zeros and ones in the glass and steel city. Throughout SOMEONE'S DEAD ALREADY, I return to the wonder of the writer's economy of language, how deftly the words infuse their amulet casings with blood temperature at the edge of boiling. This work is as hungry as revolution, a necessary, deadly still in these shifting times…"—Marc Bamuthi Joseph

someone's dead already

Bootstrap Press

sin cesar: issue 12

Antipresstigio

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