Böcker av Djelloul Marbrook

Billy Salviati just wants to be a good soldier, to follow orders and live under the radar. It's all going well until he meets Hettie Warshaw one night on a dark street in Hell's Kitchen. Then his life unravels. Saraceno is the story of a hit man whose good looks are equalled only by his gift for friendship. He survives the vicissitudes of good looks, but his gift for friendship puts him in the crosshairs of friends and enemies. Not many writers about the Mafia listened to the notorious Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, and Joey Adonis drinking marsala and chatting in a kitchen, but Djelloul Marbrook did and celebrates it with a poet's ear in this haunting tale of redemption.

The loneliness of shape is a moment's relief from the great burdens imposed on us by the ordering of society to serve the few. These poems challenge the way we are parsed by marketers in order to be sold goods, services and ideas and the way we are coerced into thinking of ourselves. They explore our connectedness, our action on each other, our operation as elixirs, our oneness, our indivisibility. They speak of our names, our stereotypes, our categories as baggage that hinders our understanding of ourselves as part of a cosmic whole.Djelloul Marbrook's previous works have won critical acclaim and prestigious prizes, including the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, the 2010 International Book Award in poetry, and the 2008 Literal Latté fiction prize. As a journalist, poet, writer and activist, he has invested his talent and intellect in an artistic voice exemplifying the best qualities of humanity. Through an engaging, well-reasoned and powerfully clear voice, he gives flight to a spiritual awakening and casts a wise shadow on the canon of American poetry.

Kill me, skin whispers / to arctic bone, / I'm finished / with this disguise…So begins the poem Blue Ampersand in Djelloul Marbrook's tenth collection of poems, Singing in the O of Not, songs of algebraic obliteration in which our identities dissolve in the grandeur of a cosmic whole. Algebra, al jabara, means the joining in Arabic, and here the singer sings himself into divine invisibility.Djelloul Marbrook's previous works have won critical acclaim and prestigious prizes, including the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, the 2010 International Book Award in poetry, and the 2008 Literal Latté fiction prize. As a journalist, poet, writer and activist, he has invested his talent and intellect in an artistic voice exemplifying the best qualities of humanity. Through an engaging, well-reasoned and powerfully clear voice, he gives flight to a spiritual awakening and casts a wise shadow on the canon of American poetry.

A man awakens, not from sleep but from spiritual torpor, and finds himself waiting elves' tables and attending elementals' parties. His journey is fabulous and perilous, like Sindbad's. His recognitions are like forbidden fruits. He fills in the blanks, connects the dots, and remembers how the heron departs at evening.Djelloul Marbrook's previous works have won critical acclaim and prestigious prizes, including the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, the 2010 International Book Award in poetry, and the 2008 Literal Latté fiction prize. As a journalist, poet, writer and activist, he has invested his talent and intellect in an artistic voice exemplifying the best qualities of humanity. Through an engaging, well reasoned and powerfully clear voice, he gives flight to a spiritual awakening and casts a wise shadow on the canon of American poetry.

Djelloul Marbrook started writing poems in Manhattan when he was fourteen. In his thirties he abandoned poetry after publishing a few poems in small journals, but he never stopped reading and studying poetry. Then at age sixty-seven, appalled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the poet within awakened. Stuffing sky-blue notebooks in his pockets, Marbrook began walking around Manhattan determined to affirm his beloved home in the wake of the nihilistic attacks. Far from Algiers emerged from hundreds of poems he has composed in the years since. Marbrook's voice speaks to anyone who has ever had doubts about belonging. Born in Algiers to an American artist and a Bedouin father and arriving in America as a gravely ill infant, Marbrook has contemplated this issue throughout his life. Far from Algiers explores "belonging" in a society that is in denial about its own nativist sentiments. It speaks of the struggle to belong in a culture that pays lip service to assimilation but does not fully accept anyone perceived as "foreign." Marbrook examines this issue with unflinching honesty. Anyone rejected by a family member or neighbor or coworker will relate to these well-crafted and moving poems.