Tia Chucha Press – serie

Editor Anne Schultz presents a collection of works by the best of Illinois's young poets.

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.

Fallout is a poetry book about growing up in Japan and living in the United States.

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

Poetry encompassing Chicano life by Chicago publisher of MARCH/Abrazo.

Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint Elizabeth Alexander's ""Body of Life,"" first published in 1996 and a collection that stands as a testament to the well-wrought line with the deeply threaded elements of history, ancestors, jazz, and family that mark the rare power inherent in Ms. Alexander's work. Her selection as the inaugural poet for 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama is well deserved - she is one of the most fresh and vital voices in American literature today.

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.

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.

Virgil Suarez speaks with intimacy and urgency of a life lived as an outsider, a life filled with dislocation and alienation born of exile. He writes with great pathos and passion, often anger, but always with the good-natured humor of a troubadour and the keen eye of a fool for life, for love. These are high-octane, feverishly energized poems that cut to the bone and heart of memory and recollection, which for the poet stand as a testament to the preservation of family, friendship and a solitary quest for human dignity.

Plumpp's new poems show his extraordinary sense of the movement of speech and the poetic line, his dazzling metaphors, and his ability to turn language inside out and upside down by looking within the words and rhythms of what we commonly say without thinking. In his poetic versions of the blues, he brings something new into American poetry both technically and spiritually. Plumpp's blues narratives are a poetic form and a dialogue between poet and subject--they are unlike anything else in American poetry: a vital, passionate, haunting poetry meant to be read and spoken and sung.

Every week at the Guild Complex--Chicago's internationally renowned cross-cultural literary center--poets open themselves up to the audience. Power Lines celebrates the first decade of the Guild Complex, its poets, and its publishing wing, Tia Chucha Press.

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.

Bum Town is Tony Fitzpatrick's allegorical tale of a journey through Chicago with the ghost of his father--revisiting the places that have changed, remembering the uncle who died as a boy trying to hop a freight during the Great Depressions, praising and dispraising a city of dreams and despair.

Tia Chucha Press continues its commitment to new writers with this first collection of poems by Anne-Marie Cusac - an edgy, meticulously written exploration with intense focus on the experience and the voices of women. Deeply engaged with living speech and the larger implications of the everyday, this book is rich with historical detail and psychological insight. Cusac's heartland lyrics restore to us the missing episodes of ordinary life, in the words of the people who lived them, and are filled with extraordinary feeling and importance.

Angela Shannon's poems bridge the real world of work, hardship, and celebration, and the spirit world of ancestors, remembrance, and faith. Singing the Bones Together brings to us this poet's marvelous talent for capturing the eloquent idiom and protean genius of seemingly ordinary black folks. Shannon's voice is genuinely new - through her characters, she gives dramatic expression to experience and feeling, and she possesses a gift for lyric poems of intimate intensity and a keen consciousness of the shared past. The historical sweep of her work is from the Middle Passage to post-integration America, and her characters - living and dead, human and in nature - create a sweet and indomitable polyphony of voices. Shannon's poems vividly imagine the thought and feeling of black women, but she also makes water, trees, nameless ghosts, and familiar spirits speak of struggle, vindication, sorrow, and hard-won love.

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.

These are poems of positions and relationships, shifting angles on received wisdom or cultural cliche, fiercely signifying in an age of raging information and vicious exploitation. For Patricia Spears Jones, subjectivity is a challenge and a bugaboo. ""Who wants to know your stuff unless Subject (Black and Female) is violated and/or perseveres against all odds?"" asks Spears Jones. She tackles grand issues like racism and sexism, but with an intimate poet's eye to details, moments, miracles, pains, and the wildness of the moon and stillness of water. History and the visual serve as analogs for this collection, tying together a diverse group of poems written about the paintings and statuary in Paris; mansions in Virginia; the commes de garcons store in Soho; or a chocolate shop's window in Munich. This is a textured landscape of troubles and terrors and temptations galore. A world that would look familiar to Dante, whose observations about winners and losers haunts these poems. ""We know more than we care to admit and live lives of such great challenge that where humor and awe finds us is where poetry begins,"" Spears Jones writes. ""Luck is a harsh thing to hang one's life on. Better to be curious. Get up. Walk out the door and face what the world offers with humor, with courage, with joy.

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.

With his latest collection of poems entitled ""American Jesus"", poet Richard Vargas continues to explore the same themes and concerns from his first book, ""McLife"" - the spectrum of high and low points in a Chicano man's existence. The poems are candid and, at times, brutally honest. Relationships, sex, politics, religion, and the mundane reality of work are presented in the belief that poetry and art in general can establish a common ground between us while maintaining our individual identity and personal validity. ""American Jesus"" veers into a more prevalent political awareness only hinted at in the previous collection. The poet assumes a voice of dissent at a time when popular opinion considers such a stance to be unpatriotic. Vargas had handed out copies of his poems to strangers on the street, tacked them on community bulletin boards, and launched them into the Internet. Many of the anti-war poems in this book were printed and taped to the windows of his apartment, in plain view for his neighbors and anyone else to read. To Vargas, the majority of these people sat still as they appeared to be manipulated by government lies and deception. Seemingly swayed by corporate-owned media, many of them slapped yellow ribbon magnets on the backsides of their SUVs. ""American Jesus"" is also a response to Laura Bush's closing the doors to poets (who had been invited to the White House for a celebration of the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes) when she realized they would be voicing opposition to President Bush's ""Shock & Awe"" war plans. While some poets often refuse to be political in their work (and thus unwittingly end up making a political statement), Vargas asks, ""If not now, when?"" ""American Jesus"" is a plea to look within ourselves and find the strength to break through the walls of fear and ignorance which we have allowed to be built around us.

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.

The poems in this manuscript are a sociopolitical, cultural conglomeration of thoughts, reflections, observations, and experiences. As a first generation Puerto Rican, the privilege of a college education has been a blessing for Resto, but it has divided her from family and friends who did not have the same opportunities. Being the first of her family with a college diploma, Resto's accomplishments and failures are not seen as individual but communal.Some of the poems in ""Unfinished Portrait"" depict the dichotomy of being true to one's culture and language, while taking advantage of the existing educational opportunities. Resto considers these poems as rebellious to the Latino status quo in the way women are perceived and treated. In addition, some of the poems question aspects of religion, specifically sexual experimentation, premarital sex, promiscuity, abortion, and the significance of life.For many years when women wrote poems of sex and love the expectation was that it had to be beautiful and meaningful. Only men seem to have the right to interchange sex and love and write about it freely without judgment. Many of Resto's poems prove that women can write about the joys of sex as well as the beauty and devastation of falling in love.Growing up in New York and moving to Los Angeles, code-switching has been commonplace in Resto's home and social circles. However, the power and place of language in classrooms, around water coolers, restaurants, and homes have been questioned and continue to be questioned by many including Latinos. The poet continues this perennial discourse in this, her first book. And there are poems that comment on the social fascination of Latinos since the alleged ""Latin Invasion"" of the 1990s. Defiance, humor, and music is a vital part of Resto's poems as much as it is of her culture.

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.

Painkiller is the final book in a trilogy of collections that started with The Weather That Kills (1995), followed by Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha, 1996). Of these three collections, the poems in Painkiller are the most emotional and intimate, and yet they are also the most universal as they look at the consequences of love found and lost; passions unleashed; terror from human conduct and the awesome power of natural disaster. While this is a collection that responds in part to 9-11, many poems were written prior to that event, to the injury to the city and our psychic well-being. Those portents and that injury set the collection’s tone. Painkiller explores one poet’s vision of the city, her friends, her lover, her losses and connects those individual perceptions to a suffering world in turmoil. In the poem "In Like Paradise/Out Like the Blues", a poem from The Weather That Kills, Patricia Spears Jones wrote: "Each of turns to the hunger of stars/and wipes the crumbs from our mouths." Painkiller is about that feast.