Books
Image and Imagination
Ben Clarke, Editor; Photographer, Dorothea LangeWriter-in-residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library, Ben Clarke, re-examines Dorothea Lange's photographs along with collaborating artists including: A.K. Black, Scott Braley, Lucha Corpi, Kitty Costello, Maketa Groves, Richard Oyama, Margot Pepper, Eric Robertson, Clifton Ross, Abena Songbird, and Rhett Stuart. Using poetry, personal essay, rap and contemporary photography the artists explore the intersection between Lange's documentary photography and current realities.
Stories from El Barrio
Piri ThomasThrough the Wall: A Year in Havana
Margot PepperMargot Pepper's memoir propels us through the blockade to post-cold war Cuba. It's a surreal world where high-ranking officials are required to pick up hitch-hikers. Root canals, cosmetic surgery and graduate school are free, but toilet paper is exorbitant. There's no income tax nor homelessness, yet no house-paint either. As the story unfolds, Margot pursues a passionate love affair with a penniless Mexican poet who shakes up her views about Cuba.
Back to the Streets
George Wynn“George Wynn writes with toughness, sympathy, and great humor about difficult things and dire situations, and wonderfully about the redeeming qualities of literature and human kindness. He makes invisible people visible, and throws light in the darkest of places.”
Elizabeth McCracken
Author of The Giant's House
Goddesses We Ain't
Edited by Lucy Bledsoe
This anthology offers
poetry, short stories, performance pieces and autobiographical memoirs
that were developed in the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center's
Women Writers Workshop. A dozen women from different cultures explore
the landscape of love, language, literacy and liberation. In forms as
diverse as the personalities of the participants. Edited and introduced
by workshop facilitator, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, the collection cuts to the
heart of women's concerns today.
Related items:
Whatever Comes of Not Knowing
Eric RobertsonLike Willian Saroyan, Roberston's humor, imagination and sensitivity awaken the senses to that which is worth celebrating in the human condition.
-- Margot Pepper
Eric Robertson writes with a plainspoken, direct, almost childlike innocence about a world of wonder and cynicism, hope and dread.
--Elaine Katzenberger
Eric Robertson writes with a southern drawl. Actually, he is from the South. Generally, I don't like anything from the South, but a guy that writes about getting baths from his grandmother... is warmly welcome in San Francisco.
-- Mark Schwart
Quetzalcoatl
Ernesto CardenalTranslated by Clifton Ross.
A bilingual edition of a book-length award-winning poem by the militant Roman Catholic priest who was Nicaragua's Sandinista Minister of culture for nearly 11 years. Through 52 poetic fragments, Ernesto Cardenal articulates a multiple vision, constantly constellated by myth that has always been one of the most effective mechanisms of his poetic creation.
ISBN 0-915117-38-X, 57 pages, perfect bound, two color uncoated cover, $11.95.
Burdens of Bliss
Janice King"Janice King's writing is musical, thought-provoking, subtly crafted and above all, honest. She speaks frankly of the `world that was too hard and incomprehensible.' Out of that struggle she has fashioned poetry which, by the subtlety of her wit and her craft, can both charm and amuse us."
Robert Volbrecht
ISBN:O9625153-4-5
60 pages
Perfect bound paperback
The Invented Camera
Jo Babcock"Repurposing a (usually) manufactured object aligns Babcock on the one hand, with Warhol and his Brillo boxes … but, in contrast to the Pop master, Babcock reintroduces his creations to the world as a new kind of functional object - a representation that now makes representations." (from the essay by Douglas R. Nickel, director for the Center for Creative Photography)
"Resolutely low-tech but conceptually adroit, the images he produces have a raw, antique sometime "terrible" beauty." (from the introduction by Bill Berkson, poet, art critic, teacher, curator)
September 11 and the U.S.War; Beyond the Curtain of Smoke
Edited By Roger Burbach and Ben ClarkePublished by City Lights and Freedom Voices
Essays providing the essential information needed to understand the origins and consequences of the September 11 attacks, US policies in the Middle East and Southwest Asia and strategies for organizing resistance to the U.S. war.
