Revolutionary Poets Brigade Los Angeles

This anthology, a selection of works from 70 local poets, and the great photo-art of local Venice artist, Mike Chamness, represents a powerful and broad spectrum of voices throughout the entire Los Angeles region. Though by no means intended to be an exhaustive collection of all the great poets there are to discover here, let this anthology speak as an introduction to the soul of our communities, here in this great city, the belly of the beast, Los Angeles, California.

A multi-lingual international poetry anthology, published by the Revolutionary Poets Brigade

This multilingual collection of poets from many countries reflects planetary resistance to the misery that global capitalism is relentlessly inflicting upon the peoples of the world. Anything less than an international response would not reflect the enormity of our solidarity as poets. These poems speak urgently of the international class struggle for revolution and social justice as the very essence of truth and beauty, the struggle to topple the open fascistic dimensions rising today. The poets in this anthology embody an historical memory as vast as our solidarity, as deep as all the struggles of the past that sought to liberate humanity from the scourges of war, racism, sexism, plunder of the environment, of capitalism's religion of money. Toward this same goal of overthrowing capitalism we say, with the poets in this anthology: Not one step back!

The sixth annual poetry anthology from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade

My Sweet Dream / My Living Nightmare: Adobe Walls

In this book, David Craven investigates the extraordinary impact of three Latin American revolutions on the visual arts and on cultural policy. The three great upheavals - in Mexico (1910-40), in Cuba (1959-89), and in Nicaragua (1979-90) - were defining moments in twentieth-century life in the Americas. Craven discusses the structural logic of each movement's artistic project - by whom, how, and for whom artworks were produced - and assesses their legacies. In each case, he demonstrates how the consequences of the revolution reverberated in the arts and cultures far beyond national borders.

ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Johnson). The volume taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss’s work in the last decades.

The 21st century has seen a resurgence of authoritarian rule that often replicates past totalitarian systems, but is more refined and nuanced in its strategies of repression and exploitation. Entertainment, media, international travel, and prosperity create the appearance of flourishing individual freedoms while our lives and thoughts are increasingly monitored and manipulated. This disturbing trend raises the question of what exactly is meant by tyranny in its contemporary forms. In Tyranny Lessons, international writers from a dozen countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas address these challenges as only literary writing can: through the perspective of lived experiences, imagined futures, and personal struggles. Tyranny Lessons also features the photography of Danny Lyon, the first photographer of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, whose work documented the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.