Kirjahaku

In A Mandala of Hands, John Warner Smith crafts poems of patient and painstaking wisdom, poems that lead the reader deliberately into an array of vantages, laboring hard to leaven inquiry with insight. At the heart of this book's mosaic approach beats a steady quest for recovery and repair. "Hold on long enough," Smith writes, "and you'll climb the steep slope/ beyond your centered self/ to the sweet jagged ledge/ where they dance." Awake to the knowledge that human hands carry "a story in every line," the well of Smith's poetic voice manages to feel both deep with waiting and fresh with resolve: "Like memory and dawn, death will heal, / wheat will bloom, and birdsongs will light / the rooms of their house. Time will love." And so, with each reading, I feel more and more compelled to echo Smith's own petition from the opening poem of this moving collection: "Let this] book talk." Geffrey Davis John Warner Smith's terrific debut collection pays homage to histories near and far, familial and mythic. Neighbors become ancestors, ancestors become neighbors offering the "songs we never heard," the songs we have yet to sing in these rich poems. Smith writes with an anthropologist's precision and a griot's reverence as he revives, recovers and reimagines the voices that unite us. A Mandala Hands is a mature and magical new book. Terrance Hayes These poems are pulsing with the slights, crimes, and public pangs of history. But they also celebrate the triumph of survival and the gift of heritage. John Warner Smith is a poet with "belief ablaze," and his A Mandala of Hands will "stand / the shifts of seas, mountains, / and human conscience." Tracy K. Smith

Poetry. African & African American Studies. MUHAMMAD'S MOUNTAIN, the first-ever book-length collection of poetry on the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali, consists of 45 poems, tracing the entire spectrum of outward events and inner forces that made Ali one of the most recognized figures in the world--the boyhood years in Louisville, Ali's rise to the top of the boxing world, his conviction and subsequent government-imposed exile for refusing to be inducted into the military, Ali's return to the ring, and the final phase of his life in which he battled Parkinson's disease while serving as an ambassador for world peace. But as Charles deGravelles, author of the best seller, Billy Canon: A Long, Long Run, notes, This is no boxing book. The complex--even seemingly contradictory--nature of this towering figure is explored poem by poem, carrying with it along the way the sweep of the second half of the American twentieth century.

Through the saga of the journey of Jesse and Ella Hayes and their seven daughters, an African American family living in a small fisheries town in Southeast Louisiana, Sisters of Gavinville chronicles the civil rights struggles of all African Americans in the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st.Aside from their rise from poverty to wealth and political power, and their gifted intellect and uncommonly strong will, what is most unusual about "the Aunties," as the sisters eventually become known to the people of Gavinville, is their longevity. With the exception of one of them, who tragically dies at a young age, all of the sisters live at least 99 years. In the end, a dark family secret and personal resentments that have been harbored and hidden for decades threaten the family honor and legacy.Sisters casts an entertaining yet illuminating and deeply thought-provoking light on the experiences of race, womanhood, human vulnerability, and spiritual reconciliation.