The Dream Of Freedom And Other Poems

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I am 27 and have never killed a man but I know the face of death as if heirloom my country memorizes murder as lullaby —from “For Fahd” Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy. Praise for Aja Monet: ““[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.” —Harry Belafonte ““In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.” —Carrie Mae Weems Of Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

Tina Celona's darkly lucid, lightly comic poems are unusually explicit in their attentiveness to the primacy of poetry as a natural force, a force akin to that of the tides or their correlative lunar cycle. Describing in clear, unabstracted terms such elements of the quotidian as war, freedom, dream, "Satisfaction," and imagination, Celona invokes poems and their poet with the same degree of focused intensity as she does more obvious, more conventionally useful objects such as Singer sewing machines, shrimp, straw, driveways, corpses. The result is not so much an elevation as a leveling, a tableau of meaning in which the poet and her poems achieve a plastic, spatial, significant reality on the luxuriously detailed plateau of the natural world: "The cliffs of the / seabed the / Poem twisting like a / Tornado over the / Plains of the interior / Decoration".