Heaven Is All Goodbyes: Pocket Poets No. 61 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, 61)
Heaven Is All Goodbyes compresses the carceral state, urban poverty, and Black communal resistance into fractured, musical poems. Political anger and dreamlike association meet in a voice that turns the lives exposed to institutional violence into poetry rather than speech or document.
Work Information
A collection where the language of resistance joins the rhythms of the street and imagines another order.
A San Francisco poet and educator weaves state violence, class, and the memory of the dead through sharp vernacular and visionary movement. The poems retain the bodily force of performance while their breaks and repetitions drive the page.
Review Summaries
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Readers and critics value the book for its political urgency and improvisational music. Its leaps of abstraction demand close attention, yet that difficulty gives the work much of its pressure.
Book Information
- Publisher
- City Lights Publishers
- Published
- 2017-09-26
- Pages
- 136 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.7 x 1.4 x 15.88 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780872867451
- ISBN-10
- 9780872867451
- Price
- 3413 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize 2018 American Book Award Winner 2018 PEN Oakland Award Winner Winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry 2018 NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year "Eisen-Martin's impeccable collection is a crucial document of this time."— Publishers Weekly , starred review This is truly revolutionary poetry. A vortex of images, observations, inspired leaps and free associations spills forth from a choir living in oppression and transience. Moments of political and spiritual convergence, surrealism and blunt materiality, gangsterism and its husk, revolution and perseverance, are captured in the music of metaphor and pure intention. Praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes : "The tesseraic language of Tongo Eisen Martin's Heaven Is All Goodbyes brings a new, shared articulation to the intricacies and interconnections of grief and life, speech and site, state and inhabitant, violence and landscape. Here, polyvocal assemblages gather and revolt against our 'porcelain epoch / succeeding for the most part / dying for the most part / married for the most part to its death.' This is resistance as sound."— Claudia Rankine "I don't know that there is a living writer whose work loves Black people as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin's work loves us. In Heaven Is All Goodbyes , like all of Eisen-Martin's work, this Black love is not clumsy, easy, sentimental or reliant on spectacle. That Black love lives in the cracked history and ambient future of who we've been in dark, and what's been done to us in the light. These poems somehow watch and listen without intervening. And when they ask, they ask everything. Heaven Is All Goodbyes makes me want to live, and write, with us forever."— Kiese Laymon , author of Long Division "What a wonderful feeling for life. If we are born—we will die. If we love—we will be rejected. If we are rejected—we will leave. The balance of these poems, one against another, gives us laughter, love and hope. Heaven isn't Goodbye—its only the next stop on our heart’s journey.”— Nikki Giovanni "Yet again Tongo Eisen-Martin employs his blade sharp intellect, his wry and piercing wit and unflinching candor to make poems that matter. This collection demands that the reader sees more than themselves—both on the page and in the surrounding world. The poems beg to be read aloud, to be pronounced as spells and incantations, as report backs from communities both known and shrouded. Read this work. Then read it again. Again. Again."— Chinaka Hodge , author of Dated Emcees "This striking new work from Tongo Eisen-Martin is a timely reminder of Amiri Baraka's call for poems that are useful , poems that breathe like wrestlers. At every turn, Heaven Is All Goodbyes demands that we engage the systemic violence woven into our daily living right alongside the persistent force that is black social life, the joy that everyday people cultivate against unthinkable odds. And even though Eisen-Martin grounds us, necessarily, in the material constraints of the modern world, he doesn’t leave us there. He calls us elsewhere. He brings us with him into a robust, illuminating vision of the worlds that exist outside and underneath the one that seeks to curtail our liberation, contain our love. This is work that challenges as it lifts. These are the unabashed abolitionist lyrics of a writer who knows that stakes are high and so is the cost of conceding our most radical dreams. In a moment marked by cynicism and disenchantment, Eisen-Martin remains a believer: in the commons, in collective struggle, in our capacity to flourish in the midst of what we were never meant to survive."— Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. 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. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog , a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from City Lights Publishers in September, 2021.
Reviews
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Tongo is one of the most important American voices of our time. His language creates cracks in the walls of oppression. So many of his lines continue to haunt me long after I’ve read them. If there is hope in this world, it is because poets like Tongo force us to see things from a different perspective, in a new light, where broken things can be put together in new ways.
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Buy more than one, you’re going to want to gift one.
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amazing.. one of a kind voice.. get this book read it and be moved and blown open
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This books has no rhyme or reason, nothing makes sense as the author jumps from phrase to phrase unrelated in bounds and leaps hoping the reader makes sense of it all, but that's not my job. The word play is weak and the imagery is too random for the metaphors to be able to adhere to each other in a coherent manner.