Books
Image and Imagination
Ben Clarke, Editor; Photographer, Dorothea LangeEncounters with the Photography of Dorothea Lange
Writer-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 Thomas
Reviews
“Stories From El Barrio is a crystal clear reflection of the general facet of Piri Thomas’s literary power. It is tender, powerfully compassionate, humanely provocative.”
Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land
Through 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. With cinematic vividness, Through the Wall reveals the failures and successes of one of the few functioning alternatives to corporate-run government, and draws out lessons that will be embraced by all who believe another world is possible.
ISBN: 0-915117-17-7 $19.95
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 Schwartz
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.
Testimony
Mat Callahan
Testimony, simultaneously published in
Switzerland, contains the text of Callahan's work from five CDs with
the Looters (Island and Monster Records) and two CDs with The Wild
Bouquet (COD Records.)
The book also includes 40 full color reproductions of paintings by the Swiss artist Mariann Müller. The artwork was created in response to the Callahan's lyrics and the two media together combine to create a stunning book.
Well-known singer and songwriter Mat Callahan's lyrics could be said to be as insightful for our time as The Message by Grandmaster Flash was in the late 1970s. Across the Border, recorded when Callahan was lead singer for the Looters, has been broadcast on television, from MTV in the United States and Europe, to Cuban television in Havana.
A companion CD, also entitled Testimony, has been released by COD Music. It contains 15 songs selected from the 7 previous albums.
Order the book
