Böcker av Albert Degenova

After Hours, a journal of Chicago writing and art, since June 2000. A bi-annual literary journal, this is issue #46 Summer 2023 with featured writer Haki R. Madhubuti. Past issues of After Hours have included Mark Turcotte, Stuart Dybek, Diane DiPrima, Norbert Blei, Billy Lombardo, Rane Arroyo, Albert DeGenova, Marty McConnell, David Hernandez, Herb Nolan, Nina Corwin, Jacob Saenz, and many more writers and artists who call (or have called) Chicago home. www.afterhourspress.com

After Hours, a journal of Chicago writing and art, since June 2000. A bi-annual literary journal, this is issue #45 Winter 2023. Past issues of After Hours have included Mark Turcotte, Stuart Dybek, Diane DiPrima, Norbert Blei, Billy Lombardo, Rane Arroyo, Albert DeGenova, Marty McConnell, David Hernandez, Herb Nolan, Nina Corwin, Jacob Saenz, and many more writers and artists who call (or have called) Chicago home. www.afterhourspress.com

Chicago poet Albert DeGenova brings his formidable strengths as a writer and jazz saxophonist to Mama's Blues, a chronicle of his mother's losing battle with Alzheimer's disease. The familiar emotions-love, grief, confusion, denial-are here, filtered through the unique DeGenova sensibility that transcends the cliches and cuts right to the heart. For anyone who has loved and lost a parent, particularly one who has suffered through dementia, this collection will bring insight, connection, and perhaps a degree of solace.-P. Hertel, co-editor of After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and ArtThe poems of Mama's Blues by Albert DeGenova ache with love, tenderness and remembrance when one's first love's own memory is fading. With direct language and poignant imagery, DeGenova offers up poems as songs to match his mother's hymnal voice. If the blues are indeed passed down from mother to son, then it's a good inheritance, a good inheritance. This book is a gift like a drink of water for a thirsty reader.-Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the CrownAlbert DeGenova's Mama's Blues is an ever-ripening suite of laments, heartfelt and musical. His poems remind us that mortality, memory, and passing time are sweet tricksters. They flimflam us into believing we see our mothers diminishing, disappearing, yet through these poems we understand a mother's legacy is always latent and forever unplumbed.-Kathleen Driskell, author of Blue Etiquette

In this daring book of poems, Albert DeGenova takes us on a personal journey through the physical, sensual world, viewed through the lens of desire. His poems, always unfolding in the present moment, vividly describe interactions that range from loving and intimate to misdirected and even destructive. While this is a world in which intimacy and connection can be approached but never fully realized, DeGenova delivers a completely satisfying piece of work. Like the relationship described in the poem "Intimacy Cocktail," Black Pearl is a "well-blended cocktail of sweat and sex and tears and foibles served over ice." -Mike Puican, poet and Board President/Guild Literary Complex