The Essential June Jordan

Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including "Poem About My Rights," "Poem About Police Violence," "Free Flight," and an essay by the poet, "For the Sake of the People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us."

June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.

Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, LOST & FOUND SERIES VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; iconic poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between North American poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar.

While Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. At the same time, Blackburn also taught part-time at City University, while bringing the vision of another world into American English, through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes's vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, the first Indigenous university in California, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational activism, presents a vision of Los Angeles cutting across race, class, and ethnicity that the work of all the writers in this Series help us realize.

SERIES VII Includes:

Audre Lorde
"I teach myself in outline," Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha 

Toni Cade Bambara
"Realizing the Dream of a Black University," & Other Writings (Parts I & II)

June Jordan
"Life Studies," 1966-1976 

Jack Forbes
"Yanga Ya," Selected Poems & The Goals of Education 

Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar
"Querido Pablito"/"Julissimo Querido," Selected Correspondence, 1958-1971 (Parts I & II) 

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Composé à la fois de récits personnels, de citations et de collages provenant notamment du New York Times, New York Temps suggère une discontinuité des états intérieurs, accentuée par la multiplicité des orateur.ices : les voix se succèdent à elles-mêmes, sont à chaque moment ce qu’elles n’étaient pas celui d’avant, apprenantes et à l’écoute de tout ce qui n’est pas elles. À travers des questions d’intertextualité et de sampling en poésie, le texte porte en lui une violence immanente – rendue plus intérieure, faite sienne –, une gêne, non seulement ressentie, mais aussi imposée, comme une protestation.

Titre original : NYT. Publié pour la première fois chez Gauss PDF en 2018. Traduit de l’anglais par Salomé Burstein.

Aurelia Guo est écrivaine et chercheuse à Londres. Elle est également l’autrice de World of Interiors (Divided Publishing, 2022).

chop is a collection of poems that center on the life and work of proto-feminist and civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer.

A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a poet, speaker, diversity and inclusion coach, and social justice educator. In 2016 she founded her company, Feminine Pronoun Consultants, LLC. Even though Treasure is completing a PhD in English Literature and Criticism, is a published writer, gifted veteran educator, and has spoken on stages all over the U.S. and in Europe, she uses her humble beginnings in the federal housing projects in Meridian, Mississippi to fuel her passion for helping college-bound families navigate college admissions painlessly and pro tably, and o ering perceptive leaders creative diversity and inclusion facilitation. Additional information on her poetry, writing, and multidimensional practice are available at: www.FemininePronoun.com.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs.

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

Paperback
252pp
ISBN: 9781739364977

Edited and introduced by Michael Cross, this book features an interview Cross conducted with Leslie Scalapino from 2007-2010, as well as Scalapino’s “Poetics” essay, both published here for the first time. 62 pages, side stapled. Cover art by Amy Evans McClure. Covers RISO printed by Aaron Cohick.

From Michael Cross’s introduction to this volume:

"I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets."