Tia Chucha Press – serie

Falling Wallendas was intended to have a single point of view, that of an older man who resists looking back and tries to look ahead in his life. It resulted from a performance piece of the same name and was chosen for the Tia Chucha list by their editorial board. Many of the poems have been published in anthologies and magazines. Most recently, "The Ice Worm" has been included in The Spoken Word Revolution (Naperville, IL:Sourcebooks mediaFusion, 2003), 143-44.

Night Song is a poetry book about Latin American life in the Midwest.

Poetry. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko recounts, Ricardo Sanchez was one of the creators of la poesia chicana and his voice was the concentrate of many silent voices. His written poetry was ambassador of the non-written sufferings of so many chicanos, whose barefoot feet were in the USA, but whose barefoot soul was endlessly walking sobre la tierra seca mexicana, muriendo de la sed.

Rooted in the social activism of Vatican II, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, the poetry of John Sheehan is filled with keen observations of place, people and time, where steel mills and sand dunes intersect with schoolchildren, overhead remarks, blues and jazz, where pumpkins sit beneath TV sets blaring the evening news. Leaving Gary confronts issues of race and class, religion and landscape, memory and media, chronicling places which changed and places we wish would change.

Black male/female relationships, and women and their significant place in the life of poet Afaa M. Weaver, make up the terrain of Talisman. The poems in this collection attempt to understand and recover the love that was there and which will always remain in the spiritual sense, long after the doors have slammed shut.

This bilingual anthology presents the work of twenty-one poets in Chicago's thriving literary community whose cultural and linguistic heritages are rooted in Latin America and Spain. The poems collected here are dazzling and unpredictable, forming an iridescent mosaic that transcends language, borders, and boundaries.

Diane Glancy's eye and ear for the details of land and language make this poetry collection a powerful and important work about modern America. Glancy marries impressive wordplay with great emotional range, articulating the edge between two disparate cultures and the challenges of attempting to live in both. Relief of America is a major contribution to the growing body of millennial works guiding us toward the future by delving intimately into the starkest and most poetic aspects of our past.

In her debut collection of poems, My Sweet Unconditional, ariel robello meets us at the horizon, where worlds blend in the blush of sunrise and sunset, where land meets sea, air meets earth, and where man and machine interrupt the natural ebb and flow of life. Unapologetically, she declares her faith in a love that defies borders and with each poem she weds herself to a belief that unconditional love can still be found in the cracks of an urban sidewalk, dancing above puffing smoke stacks, behind a guerrilla's mask, in the worn paint brush of an island love, blundering below a street lamp in Ensenada, spelled out in daisies on a veteran's tombstone, in the stitch of a huipil and most importantly - deep inside one's own reflection. With language as radiant and dangerous as broken glass ariel robello cuts away at the political dogma and superficial beauty of a world unhinged to reveal a bloody but dignified glimpse of love in the hands of a New World survivor.

Since 1989, Tia Chucha Press has been a leader in publishing artistically innovative and culturally provocative voices in poetry. The roster of poets the Press has brought to publication reflects a deep commitment to diversity and features established artists, such as Elizabeth Alexander, Virgil Suarez, and Diane Glancy, as well as first books by award-winning poets Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan, and Patricia Smith. Tia Chucha Press has had a powerful impact on the literary world as a very important first press for many poets and a respectable, high quality press for all. ""The Tia Chucha Press Anthology"" is more than a book of poetry; it is a fifteen year archive of real American life, a testament of democracy in verse, from the gritty streets of East Los Angeles to lonely Indiana avenues. The work in this anthology explores the tough and the tender, the personal as political, with humor, passion, humanity, and grace. ""The Tia Chucha Press Anthology"" includes study guides and writing exercises suitable for middle school, high school, and college-aged learners. Both thematic and craft issues are highlighted.

Frozen Accident is a long poem and, echoing Dante, its primary section ""Nezahualcoyotl in Mictlan"" narrates a trip to hell. Yet, Mictlan is not quite the Inferno. For Alfred Arteaga, the place of the dead is California, the last stop for Western culture, the final limit of its reach. The West's poets and philosophers have long declared history over, god dead, and that what remains is merely the house of language. In other words, all is but frozen accident. If the endpoint is California, the poem's point of departure is an assassination that radically shaped history. A young man witnessed his father's murder in a power play that unintentionally enabled the Aztecs to establish an empire. The young man, Nezahualcoyotl, became the philosopher king of Texcoco and wrote the most famous poem of pre-conquest Americas, ""Song of Flight."" What did it mean to be and then to cease to be? Were we all, after all, perhaps but texts of god, existing only in the breath, and red and black inks of divine poetry?

What is most compelling about Linda Susan Jackson's debut collection of poems, ""What Yellow Sounds Like"", is the extraordinary self-possession of its young female narrator as she seeks to answer who am I and to whom do I belong? These poems are about the process of shaping the identity of one girl who comes from ""a line of technicolor women"" who have ""honey/suckle buried freely in the folds of their flesh,"" a girl who comes from ""men who bit their tongues/ate dirt, dust and their pride, worked anywhere"", and could ""soar off the ground."" The terrain of Jackson's poems is particular, perilous, loving, humorous, passionate, uncompromising, contradictory - in other words, vastly human. The language is varied and inflected with the blues, and like the blues, pulls readers in through images and details that are both concrete and symbolic. Poem after poem charts the stages of this young girl's development through her relationships with her family, her history, and the America into which she is born that is defined by race, skin color, gender, and class. The narrator develops a profound and essential connection to the legendary singer, Etta James, the ""canary colored blues woman"" and she recognizes the power in the sound of words as she recollects how Etta James ""churned up her roar/to keep other women from dying."" Near the end of the book, her great-grandmother tells her ""Everything don't need to be told. Some things must."" In this moment, the narrator is empowered to decide what to tell and to tell it in her own voice. These poems celebrate the sheer will and determination of the self to seek out and find who or what it needs to grow and prosper.

Sometimes in our culture it seems that poetry has become tiny. It should be huge. It should be the whale that swallows the world and gives it back to us transformed. Susan Anderson's work shapes passion on the page, utilizing a variety of personas, delving into the past of a person or a place, taking sides, making an argument. She's keenly attuned to the eloquence of the voiceless, portraying the spiritual resourcefulness of the people whose culture she was not only born into, but chose to embrace.The stories of ordinary life are the substance of history; the passage of events is reflected in daily intimacies. Through these intricacies, African Americans have provided their gifts to the world. Susan Anderson's poetry strives to contain some bits of their music and history, justice and love, which is woven into every corner of America, and so the world.

Simultaneously clear yet mythically transcendent, the poems in ""Heart's Migration"" speak power in a woman's voice. Rodriguez unmasks the human heart in its many beguiling and compelling forms: passion, oppression, and liberation. She evokes and re-imagines classical, biblical, Cherokee, Latino, and other American themes in strikingly personal and sometimes humorous ways as she lovingly renders the heart's eternal encounter with joy and loss.

Prison writing has a long and illustrious history in the United States - home of the modern correctional system. In the first decade of the 21st century, this country also garnered the distinction of having more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the world. We need to hear from the incarcerated writings of incarcerated men and women. The largest state prison system is in California with some 175,000 people behind bars in close to 35 facilities. Yet the only approved Honor Yard in the Department of Corrections is at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, California. These are the men that despite often-horrendous crimes - many are lifers, with a few going on three decades - have proven their capacity to dream, to create, to write, to change. From poems, to stories, to novel excerpts, to reportage, to personal essays - and a few drawings - ""Honor Comes Hard"" depicts what can happen to people who are given, as Clarence Darrow expressed many years ago, 'a chance to live'. The work is drawn from writing classes that Lucinda Thomas helped organize in the Honor Yard over several years, and from workshops conducted by Luis J. Rodriguez on most Sundays, for eight hours a day, through eight months in 2007-2008.

José Antonio Rodríguez’s poetry is one of memory, both private and public. It is grounded in storytelling and lyricism that reveal a speaker’s developing awareness as he traverses borders of nation, language, class, and sexuality. The poems move back and forth between a home left behind on the south side of the Rio Grande and a new home on the north side. Both awe-struck by and apprehensive of the world around him, the speaker searches for a way to claim a new space, a place of belonging. Through these poems, both lyrical and narrative, tender and tense, familiar and estranging, the poet invites us to examine the very concept of home—how we define it, what constitutes it, the ways it can be destabilized and how, in the most trying times, we must learn to sustain the hope of it in our hearts.

Tracking a nonlinear trek across terrain as distinct as Timbuktu and Baton Rouge, and beliefs as “contrary” as Christianity and Communism, in The Armageddon of Funk Michael Warr manages to interconnect a world of opposites. Via “poetic memoir” we join his navigation through the “apolitical,” rigid morality of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; the revolutionary theories and free love of Black Panthers and Marxists; the promise of a bourgeois future from bank executives; a screaming soldier brandishing an AK-47 in his face, a blizzard of white termite wings; an interrogation under Haile Selassie’s Jubilee Palace; hallucinating of “of cornbread islands” at Chicago’s “Velvet Lounge,” and many “Street Signs, Convolutions, and other California Coincidences” as one poem is titled in this second collection. Warr’s poetry, like his life, is full of interruptions and circularity that captures the broad sweep of the times and microscopic idiosyncrasies of the moment.

Ascension explores the delicacy and the fragility of all re­lationships; not just the romantic ones in nature, but the ones we have with our family, friends, community, city, politics, nature, history, and ourselves. Some poems focus on the complexity, nascency, and dissolution of these re­lationships while other verses are unapologetic with their celebration of the self.

4-Headed Woman is a journey into and through womanhood—from preadolescence through menopause—and an exploration of women’s relations with one another. The poems employ female domestic imagery, manifest in the titles in the book’s first section, which name different types of breads found throughout the world—from coconut to pita. Yet many of these poems are sparse and abstract in their trajectory. The poems in the second section focus specifically on menses, weaving together biological, folk, and cultural aspects in a humorous tone. The third section, “Graffiti Poem,” comprises poems centered around college restrooms, which Adisa sees as a site of communication—through graffiti among other means—for students on a wide variety of social-sexual issues. In 4-Headed Woman, Adisa bravely explores and uncovers taboos about womanhood in a controlled and at times lyrical style laced with humor.

Tia Chucha Press started twenty-five years ago in Chicago with the publication of Luis J. Rodriguez's first book, Poems Across the Pavement. As founder/editor of the Press, Rodriguez has sincepublished more than fifty poetry collections of quality crosscultural U.S. poets, as well as anthologies, chapbooks, and a CD. Tia Chucha Press is now a project of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, which Rodriguez helped create in 2001 with his wife Trini.We are honored to announce the 25th Anniversary Edition of Poems Across the Pavement—close to twenty poems of an emerging poet that began a prolific writing career.

Bless the Ashes is an urban hymn to elemental influences: Peter Harris's mother and the reverberations of the ethical gifts she gave him during her fifty-seven years on earth; the integrity at the core of cultures crafted under duress by people of African descent; the nourishment of waters, actual and symbolic; powerful music (from the One and 4/4 to symphonic and atonal); as well as the exhilaration of tapping the flow of creativity. These poems are about an adult search for deep humanity and the best of community. This book crystallizes Harris's most expansive quest for a creative voice of individuality and inspiration. With Bless the Ashes, he uses words to blend the imaginative, emotional, and intellectual to get beyond words and into a visceral field that should move anyone participating fully into their human journey.

This anthology features the vitality and variety of verse in the City of Angels, a city of poets. This is more about range then representation, voice more than volume. Los Angeles has close to 60 percent people of color, 225 languages spoken at home, and some of the richest and poorest persons in the country. With an expansive 502.7 square miles of city (and beyond, including the massive county of 4,752.32 square miles), the poetry draws on imagery, words, stories, and imaginations that are also vast, encompassing, a real ""leaves of grass.""Well-known poets include Holly Prado, Ruben Martinez, traci kato-kiriyama, and Lynne Thompson. Many strong new voices, however, makes this a well-rounded collection for any literary class, program, bookstore, or event.The image of the coiled serpent appears in various forms in mythologies throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, India, and America. In pre-conquest times, Quetzalcoatl—the Precious Serpent—served as a personification of earth-bound wisdom, the arts and eldership in so-called Meso-America, one of seven ""cradles of civilization"" that also includes China, Nigeria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Peru.

The San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County was a vibrant citrusand-nut growing area for much of the twentieth century before it became a suburban and industrial sprawl east of Los Angeles. Hidden among Mexican migrant camps and barrios were street gangs that from the 1960s to the present made this area known as “The Valley of Death.” Gang injunctions—where law enforcement targeted select gangs for curfews, stop-and-frisks, database gathering, arrests, and more—were first initiated here. By the 1980s, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and other Asians with money bought out whole neighborhoods. Streets with shacks and unpaved roads now have mansions and town houses. Poorer residents were pushed further east—to the Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and the deserts.This book tells stories of six former gang members, drug addicts, and incarcerated men who lived through intense incidents of violence as well as shifts in populations, industry, and means—and how they overcame the odds. Good for use in prisons, juvenile lockups, schools, and community organizations to show that change is always possible, it is an argument for restorative justice, drug treatment, mental health services, spiritual practices, jobs training, and the arts instead of mass incarceration.

Over twenty-five years ago two Americans, Dr. Diana Frade and her husband, Episcopalian Bishop Leo Frade, founded Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Until then abandoned girls were often given to prisoners since no such homes existed. Now Our Little Roses has some 60 rescued or orphaned girls in a city once considered the “murder capital of the world.” Poverty and violence—especially in the past 25 years attributed to deported Los Angeles–based gangs—has affected the lives of all in the poorest Spanish-speaking country of the hemisphere. Unaccompanied youth from Honduras were among the 100,000 refugees, which also included children and youth from El Salvador and Guatemala, arriving to the United States between 2013 and 2015. American poet and Episcopalian priest Spencer Reece spent two years at Our Little Roses teaching poetry to girls who have lost family due to poverty, violence, and disasters like Hurricane Mitch that struck Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in 1998, resulting in 22,000 people dead or missing, 2.7 million homeless, and $6 billion in damages.This book has essays by Reece and Luis J. Rodríguez as a backdrop to the girls’ voices, and a foreword and afterword by poets Marie Howe and Richard Blanco. Luis and his wife Trini, a poet, teacher, and indigenous healer, also helped teach at Our Little Roses and the Holy Family Bilingual School inside a walled compound in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Here poetry and stories transcend the pain of loss that often goes unexpressed. Here poetry serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration in the shadows. Here poetry can save lives.

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology of poems from one of California's high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodriguez, sponsored by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. Rodriguez, who is Tia Chucha Press's founding editor, and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. Here's restorative/transformative justice in action. Here's redemption in the flesh. Here are voices and viewpoints needed for a just and equitable world for all.  Funded by the Arts for Justice Fund, the project is part of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural's 'Trauma to Transformation Program.'

Seeking the most powerful healing practices to address the invisible wounds of war, Dr. Ed Tick has led journeys to Vietnam for veterans, survivors, activists, and pilgrims for the past twenty years. This moving and revelatory collection documents the people, places, and experiences on these journeys. It illuminates the soul-searching and healing that occurs when Vietnamese women and children and veterans of every faction of the "American War" gather together to share storytelling and ritual, grieving, reconciliation, and atonement.These poems reveal war's aftermath for Vietnamese and Americans alike and their return to peace, healing, and belonging in the very land torn by war's horrors.