Children's Literature. California Interest. Illustrations by Robert Trujillo. Translated from the Spanish by Cinthya Jeanette Muñoz Ramos. Bilingual Edition. I AM SAUSAL CREEK/SOY EL ARROYO SAUSAL is a bilingual children's book about the environmental and cultural history of Oakland told through the voice of a local waterway, Sausal Creek. "I love this book. There are so many layers. The illustrations are deceptively gorgeous, because they are also a visual narrative about values. The story is surprisingly easygoing, because it is also a people's history and an environmentalist allegory. And most of all, I AM SAUSAL CREEK is a story about resilience and renewal, which is to say, it is story about Oakland."—Innosanto Nagara, Author/Illustrator, A is for Activist and Counting on Community "I AM SAUSAL CREEK is a story of redemption. It is the story of one creek in Oakland, California, but it could easily represent thousands of other creeks across the US. I highly recommend this book for both its historical accuracy and message of hope."—Madeleine Dunphy, Web of Life Children's Books "Environmental justice for children at its best! Reyes captures the essence of Sausal Creek and how it has flowed through time. My third graders absolutely love this book, and it was easy to incorporate into my social studies, science, and writing curriculum."—Seema Patel, Third-grade Teacher

I Am Sausal Creek/Soy El Arroyo Sausal

Children's Books

Reyes, Melissa

Education & Reference

Nomadic Press

Poetry. California Interest. Paul Corman-Roberts' 2015 collection of poetry. "WE SHOOT TYPEWRITERS has it humor and its witticisms, but it's the wisdom found in the plainly stated and curiously observed that offers up the hard truths needed to shake the reader into awareness, and wake 'the chutzpath / to call ourselves mirrors / worthy of human reflection."—Arisa White, author of DEAR GERALD (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2015) and Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize Finalist "Paul Corman-Roberts writes poems that are tired from working two jobs, poems that are sick of moving, exhausted from gentrification; these are poems that have lived in more than their fair share of cramped studio apartments and packed all their worldly goods into milk crates ... Word by word, line by line, poem by poem, WE SHOOT TYPEWRITERS is a collection that remembers what it was like to be there, in the moment-and what it's like to have made it out alive."—Allie Marini, author of AND WHEN SHE TASTED KNOWLEDGE (Nomadic Press, 2015) We Shoot Typewriters is a collection from a seasoned bard that explores the necessary role of poets in our world, the shadow side of ourselves, the search for love, the joy and torment of parenthood, and the absurdity of it all. Each poem takes the reader out into the greater universe, then returns them-whip-lashed-with a piece of raw, yet palatable truth."—Sarah Kobrinsky, Emeryville Poet Laureate WE SHOOT TYPEWRITERS is a thriller in the De Palma tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger—and we identify with him completely."—Alexandra Naughton, founder and publisher of Be About It Press

We Shoot Typewriters

Literature & Fiction

Corman-Roberts, Paul

Poetry

Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. Cassandra Dallett's 2015 collection of poetry. "These poems speak of love, sex and relationships in the way they are actually lived, with all the pleasures and brutality. They are tender, bitter and, above all, unfailingly true."—William Taylor, Jr., author of BLOOD OF A TOURIST (sunnyoutside, 2014) "In poem upon poem, Cassandra Dallett pours out her cool and steaming heart in unmeasured rouds of bittersweet toasts and takes. Dallett's voice and vision shine."—Al Young, California Poet Laureate and author of Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2007) "Cassandra Dallett writes like a feminist self-aware Charles Bukowski. Sure there's plenty of sex, drugs, violence, and rock 'n' roll, but there's a lot of quiet 'spots of time,' as Wordsworth would say, where the clearly defined and explained devolves into the philisophical, and the stereotype changes into a nuanced portrait...Dallett never apologizes for or shies away from her own faults, cravings, addictions, and mistakes."—Christine Hamm, author of Echo Park (BlazeVOX, 2011)

On Sunday, a Finch

Dallett, Cassandra

Poetry. Art. Women's Studies. Collaboration. Artwork by Mariela Yeregui. Mullin's poems are spare investigations into what it means to collaborate and to remember. They address what comes of the neurological, emotional, and social mandate that is both collaboration and memory, and in their brevity, offer small moments of singular present tense. "Michaela Mullin's MUST is appropriately titled in every sense of the word—from the tender ironies and quiet insistences, to poems that create their own likely logic through her singular sensibility—this is a collection that should not be overlooked. While the poems often find their source in the intellect, the cleverness doesn't compromise their fervency. These are poems that resonate not only in the mind, but in the heart and the body as well."—Teri Youmans Grimm, author of Dirt Eaters "Michaela Mullin's short poems offer pitch-perfect inflections of the multi-voiced conversations we hold in dialogue with not quite inanimate objects: art works, fairy tales, previous poetry. Each poem finds a way to interrupt itself—signaled sometimes through punctuation, and sometimes through words tumbling over each other—but quickly the intrusion enters into a discourse, generating a rhythm and creating a duet. Birds and wedding rings, a fugitive lost object, paintings, videos: Mullin conjures them forth in unexpected combinations and they move forward together, now a single entity. In her poetry, each new composite resonates clearly—but the affinity is only momentary; she dissolves these relationships just as quickly as they came together. But something new lingers, shifting the way we configure our world. The pleasure of the initial reading intensifies in re- reading."—Lenore Metrick- Chen, author of Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900 "Michaela Mullin's poems mesmerize. With a light but sure touch she moves from childhood reveries to her adult fascinations... The aphoristic poems in must combine heart and mind with determination and playfulness."—Steve Langan, author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar

must

Mullin, Michaela

Yeregui, Mariela

Poetry. California Interest. Cyrus Armajani's debut poetry collection is borne of the worlds of public policy and public art. These are public poems, leaving room for readers to question, to doubt, and come to their own understandings. One cannot help but sense the caring hand, open mind, and desire for a world more just and democratic than the world we currently inhabit. "These poems are clean-crisp, and sharp-witted too. Armajani's BENEFITS OF DOUBT is what you love about poetry—the distillation of experience that makes beauty come alive in the quotidian. These poems gift you with seeing anew. As we go about in a state of 'not'—not paying attention—here is Armajani reminding us to 'write from your inner cliff your inner mule not jumping,' helping us to recognize that we are living our lives 'as if there's no end stop.' The play of language continues on in that conversational tone that gives you the distinct feeling poetry is always with you. It is even found there in the 'Dialogue' of juveniles, breaking down the difference between robbing and stealing is that 'robbing is when you go right up to someone and say / gimme all you got.' And there is no doubt, for this collection, Armajani has emptied out his pockets for you."—Arisa White "Cyrus Armajani's poetry follows radio waves that stretch across the world; it sketches a precise cartography of three, four, even five dimensions as it reflects the decidedly uncertain in the empirical. Open these pages to find an atlas of practical advice for a surreal navigation of what human have made of this world. His is an odd theology that squats smack in the silences of dialectical materialism."—Sharon Coleman "In BENEFITS OF DOUBT, we meet a mind preternaturally alert to the subtlest congress of meanings that shift beneath the utterances of daily speech and the experiences of daily life. Cyrus Armajani follows each movement with alarming skill, and in so doing he exposes to us what vitalizes the spectrum of doubt that shapes how we perceive the world we inhabit. The text is kaleidoscopic in its ranging from the candid to the contrived, from the authentic to the absurd. Yet when we take in the whole of the work, we realize a complex, even beguiling glimpse of the revelatory."—Rusty Morrison

Benefits of Doubt

Armajani, Cyrus

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Forced to flee a violent, inhospitable America, the poems in THE PLANET OF THE DEAD hold an unforgiving mirror, forcing us to take an unwavering look at our current police state, proving there is no safety in the classroom or in the streets. "THE PLANET OF THE DEAD is teeth being cut in an intimate frame. Despite an empire's bullet and paper enthusiasm, the writer announces a cosmic domain. Writing against empire, René Vaz is one of our warriors returned."—Tongo Eisen-Martin "From its intriguing title THE PLANET OF THE DEAD to its kaleidoscopic vision of life in 21st century USA, Vaz delivers urgent poems for urgent times. This is a tense chronicle—a memoir in poetic form. A key poet of the emerging Latino generation that needs to be read now."—Alejandro Murguía "Imagine a social reality in which one can say, 'Your hands were up the moment you were born.' This is the case of the speaker in René Vaz' compelling first book [THE PLANET OF THE DEAD]. His mother calls him an 'american sun.' But this sun's body is 'born to serve, to knead, to plow, to pick, to push, to care, to crawl, to work, to die.' The alienation is so complete that the planet of the dead, Pluto, becomes a metaphor for home. In the post-Ferguson world, nothing is quite itself. It's more than double-consciousness; a policeman's eyes can burn straight through you. That cruel game is played at the level of one's skin, and the wound is everywhere: 'My skin / is chosen / My skin like a tattoo / like stigmata, like sin.' This book is a fable for our time."—Paul Hoover "René Vaz opens his powerful new collection THE PLANET OF THE DEAD by stating this truth: 'We are required to harm others.' Startlingly, he sets this dictum of damage not in today's war zones, but in art's supposed sanctuary, the MFA classroom—'if a classmate called the police, I would be the first one shot and still // all around me people are dying // one typo // one typo is all it takes and you wear that typo (like your skin).' Vaz maps the 'everyday walk' of art and violence joined together for an artist of color—'Cut, censor, edit, censor, revise, censor, color, censor, write and censor'—in language haunted by longing and burdened with experience. An accounting is made—'With a forced silver knife, I cut away at pieces of me in order to construct a body.' The speaker of these poems has hands raised in self preservation, yes, but also in pointing to a small cold planet: 'I will fill the wilderness of ice, minerals, crystal and bone with the wildflowers that grew in soil that was mine but not mine.' Here is a song of stunning possibility."—Barbara Tomash

The Planet of the Dead

Vaz, René

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. California Studies. THE FLOWERS IN MY MOTHERS' NAME is a chapbook collection of nonfiction prose poetry that explores the intersectionality of narrator Philip Harris. A gay, Mexican man from Southern California, Harris finds himself at the center of cultures, sexuality, and generations. Through explorations of his mother's life as a Chicana faced with racist microaggressions, his grandmother's grief, and his own queer existence as a person of color with passing white privilege, Philip shares his multicultural narrative. "In THE FLOWERS IN MY MOTHERS' NAME, Philip Harris fearlessly explores his roots and tangled loyalties, what it means to feel love for one's Mexican mother and her struggles while trying to individuate his own gay identity he so early recognizes. It is an homage to truth and growth and the terribly rich framework of what is ours and how the world tries to shred its meaning. What he finds is what he needs. That is the power of the story of Philip / Felipe, the flowers of his empathy, his truth, and its hard-earned beauty of acceptance."—Maxine Chernoff "These beautiful prose poems tease out the mysteries and griefs of identity forged in the crucible of American childhood. In reclaiming his mothers' name, Philip Harris has written a new prayer book, its patron saints the Virgin and La Llorona, its pages a wreath of flowers to lay at their feet."—Garth Greenwell "We admire the flower in bloom fullness, delighting in the vibrant color of a wind-shivering petal or its resilience in blossoming after the viciousness of winter or the pruner's shears. What goes unnoticed often is the becoming. What can the flower teach us of that journey? Harris offers us an intimate seeing in these poems of witness, drawing us as readers into personally expansive moments that resonate in canto y flor. Through the interweaving of familial stories in the structured block of the prose poem, primarily those of son, mother, and grandmother, we experience the thousand bee stings of microaggressions as much as we do tenderness and acceptance within the family. Ultimately, the revelations within his work resist white supremacy's hegemony and cultural erasure; rather, this collection insists on the deeply personal and human experience, the revealing of the flower in its time."—Raina J. León "THE FLOWERS IN MY MOTHERS' NAME is a brave and intimate book. There's comedy, as well as a great deal of pain, and above all: honesty. Harris, who wastes no words, has written a moving tribute to two strong women, as well as a gut-punch of a memoir. You want to know what it's like to grow up in America? Read this."—Peter Orner "A melodic, poetic, memoir hybrid, Philip Harris' THE FLOWERS IN MY MOTHERS' NAME, is a stark and yet surprisingly intimate book about family and self. Harris's flashes of familial history are beautifully reflected in his contained prose, each brief story a slight shifting of perception told in first or in third, is a quiet agonizing or celebration of the personal and political lives that reside in our everyday lives."—MK Chavez

The Flowers in My Mothers’ Name

Harris, Philip

History & Criticism

Poetry. California Interest. RAPID TRANSIT is a humorous and poignant romp down the rusting tracks of American public transit, filled with haunting and colorful characters--those we wish to embrace, run from, those we see ourselves reflected in. It begs the question: do we ever truly reach our destinations?

Rapid Transit

Naughton, Alexandra

Poetry. California Interest. African &amp; African American Studies. Art. Through strikingly sensitive poetry and song, Rohan DaCosta contemplates the change of a place through the eyes of a changing person. Haunting street photography shows us the romantic realism of a neighborhood in flux, a community in crisis. Fires rage and tent cities rise. Themes of pride, resilience, and refuge are carefully braided throughout. THE EDGE OF FRUITVALE is at once documentary, autobiography, and fictional narrative.

The Edge of Fruitvale

Arts & Photography

DaCosta, Rohan

Photography & Video

Winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award\nA blistering exploration of America’s legacy of anti-Black violence from an indispensable poet of our time\nAmerican history got you down? Are you feeling alienated? Join poet James Cagney in his blistering second collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness, as he journeys through time, space, and memory with caustic, satirical beauty. Recall American history through its spent shell casings! Turn familial ghosts into art valuable for generations! In these fully charged poems, James Cagney storms through American fields blooming with artillery and anger on his thirsty quest for love, peace, and acceptance in the smallest, most precious gestures.

Martian: The Saint of Loneliness

Cagney, James

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