Böcker av Martin Wiley

This collection tells of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed-race, growing up, facing police, and confronting himself. In a time of profound change for the world around him, he seeks to "remember / just when I stopped being cute."

If you hear Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes singing through this tender howl of rage, it's because in 21st Century America Martin Wiley, the poet and paterfamilias, just wants to goof around with his kids, but there's a brutal war on Black bodies outside his door so he still has to wake up in the heavy morning not wanting "to know/how we died last night."-Jeff Conant, father, and author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista InsurgencyIf "every word is a war" on the news, these poems are daisies in the guns pointed at us on the daily. Like a cousin to Baraka's suicidal preface in 1961, this long song meditates on how children fill the gaps in our broken hearts and light the way to our backstories.-Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, 3rd Poet Laureate of Philadelphia