Dyke (geology)

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness."

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future.

Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.

Askia Touré is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.