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.
Blood on the Fog , his newest collection of poems, is volume 62 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series..
He is also the author of someone\'s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015).
He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award.
Browne About author(s): Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California.
This means Tongo Eisen-Martin \'s poetic legacy will live forever.-- Mahogany L.
This means these poems are heavy in their desire to free our current state of stoic apathy.
Each poem leads us towards our liberation.
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.
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.
More disturbance as the groove.
More fugue than state.
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.
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.
A master craftsman and a sensitive artist, he reserves his sledgehammer words for the cruelty of imperialism.
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.
Radical, outraged, knowing, wry, and deeply humane, these are poems of survival that soar with a vision of collective liberation.
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.
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.
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
