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Name: 4-Headed Woman
Brand: Opal Palmer Adisa
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Cipota under the Moon

Coming Home in Viet Nam

Edward Tick

Paperback

$19.95

Counting Time Like People Count Stars

Spencer Reece

Paperback

$19.95

Crossing with the Light

Dwight Okita

Paperback

$6.95

Dancing in Your Mother's Skin

Patricia Spears Jones

From Trouble to Triumph

How Fire Is A Story, Waiting

Melinda Palacio

Paperback

$14.95

In the Courtyard of the Moon

Life According to Motown

Patricia Smith

Paperback

$15.95

Looking for a Soft Place to Land

Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl

Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Paperback

$16.95

My Sweet Unconditional

Nostalgia for a Trumpet

Patricia Spears Jones

Paperback

$15.95

Place of the White Heron

Alejandro Morales

Paperback

$19.95

Poems Across the Pavement

Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams

Shards of Light/Astillas De Luz

Xochiquetzal Candelaria

Paperback

$19.95

Singing the Bones Together

South Side Girl’s Guide to Love & Sex

Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Paperback

$19.95

We Are All the Black Boy

Michael Warr

Paperback

$6.95

What Yellow Sounds Like

Opal Palmer Adisa

4-Headed Woman

$14.95

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.

Richard Vargas

American Jesus

$13.95

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 three 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.

Michael Warr

Armageddon of Funk

$15.95

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.

Claudia Castro Luna

Cipota under the Moon

$19.95

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

Daniel A. Olivas

Coiled Serpent

$24.95

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.

Spencer Reece

Counting Time Like People Count Stars

$19.95

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.

Quraysh Ali Lansana

Dream of a Word

$14.95

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. Dream of a Word 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. Dream of a Word includes study guides and writing exercises suitable for middle school, high school, and college-aged learners. Both thematic and craft issues are highlighted.

Chiwan Choi

Flood

$15.95

“When I first started working on ‘The Flood,’ the title piece from this collection of poems, I thought it was about the World, about Politics, about Race, about all the things that begin with capital letters that make up Life. And in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina came and left such destruction, opening up old social wounds and sins in the process, I thought this was my chance to be big, to be grand, to tackle the important subjects that important artists are seemingly never afraid of. I was going to make my statement. I was going to be heard. I was going to leave my mark.” With this statement, Chiwan Cho begins to describe the impulses behind this most promising and powerful collection of poetry. His voice gives his poems a deep level of intimacy, while his economy of language distinguishes his work as authentic and accessible. This collection is a journey to discover the poet, Chiwan, as a man, as a Korean, as a son, as a husband, as a writer. He embraces the smallest moments in his life—finding key details, examining them, breaking them down and rebuilding them, to see if, somewhere in the smallest fragments, both trivial and tragic, the poet can discover himself, reflected, resonating with his father teaching him how to survive. Chiwan says that in the process of writing the poems in “The Flood,” he often repeated to myself Ezra Pound’s Canto 117, the line “That I have lost my center/fighting the world.” By the time Chiwan polished each line in each poem, he’d found that center again, even if it was for a fleeting moment. “Over eight years after I wrote the first words of this poem I thought I’d never finish, I found what I had lost. My core. My heart,” Chiwan says. “It was never about wars and tyrants and poverty nor about any of the Isms that want to suffocate us each and every day. I realized how far off the track I’d gone without realizing it.”

Alfred Arteaga

Frozen Accident

$13.95

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?

Lucinda Thomas

Honor Comes Hard

$14.95

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, CA. 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.

Humberto Ak'abal

In the Courtyard of the Moon

$19.95

Born from dreams, from stones that speak, from ordinary words (found not in the dictionaries but in the marketplaces), from the wrinkles of a grandmother’s face, from the laughter of the rain, the poems of Humberto Ak’abal bring us to a different way of listening to the world. With a simple and direct touch, Ak’abal—writing in Maya K’iché—gathers the beauty, pain, sadness, and anger that is felt in contemporary Guatemala. His poetry, presented here in Spanish and English, also provides a bridge across a cultural divide that has plagued the Americas since the conquest, giving Indigenous peoples, who have lived in the shadows for centuries, a voice. Although there have been Indígenas writing in Spanish since the colonial era, receiving little attention until the past few decades, they remain largely unknown in English-speaking North American and European cultures. In the Courtyard of the Moon makes a profound contribution to correcting this injustice for scholars and lovers of poetry anywhere.

Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl

$16.95

A beloved poetry collection, available again The word “vos/z,” spoken in Salvadoran Spanish, means “you” and also means “voice.” If the word ends in “s” it means “you”; ending in “z” it means “voice.” Leticia Hernández-Linares’s poetry comes in somewhere between the S and the Z, and it is, like bread, like music, for everyone. The way Hernández-Linares shares her stories speaks to the hybridity of the cultural and literary histories she hails from. Hernández-Linares’s poemsongs are her personal flor y canto. Mexican and Central American indigenous ancestors combined the concepts “in xochitl, in cuicatl” (in flower, in song) to define poetry—the poetic oral tradition they used to teach, engage, and philosophize. Hernández-Linares’s writing excavates the faces of women in her family, silences in her community, and shapes their stories into a poetry that sings, and other times dances on the page. “I am cut from Santa Ana, El Salvador mujer steel, y qué orgullo,” says Hernández-Linares.

Ariel Robello

My Sweet Unconditional

$13.95

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.

Susan D. Anderson

Nostalgia for a Trumpet

$13.95

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.

Patricia Spears Jones

Painkiller

$15.95

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.

Denise M. Sandoval

Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams

$24.95

The Northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is the second largest community of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States with 500,000 people. Yet, until 2001 the Northeast Valley had no trade bookstores, movie houses, art galleries, or decent cultural spaces. That year Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural opened its doors, first as a cultural café, which in ten years has provided workshops in music, visual arts, dance, theater, writing, and indigenous cosmology—along with an art gallery, a poetry press, a youth empowerment project, and the only annual outdoor literacy and performance festival in the area, “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.” Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams borrows its name from the name of one of its communities Pacoima, a Native American word meaning “rushing waters.” Interviews with artists, community leaders, politicians, and well-known personalities essays, research, photos, art pieces, poetry, and cultural tableau, explore twenty years of how the lack of neighborhood cultural spaces adversely affects struggling families and communities, and how the example of Tia Chucha’s inspires a cultural awakening and a revival of the economy and community spirit. The book speaks to a need for a national arts policy of cultural spaces, arts education, independent bookstores, public art projects, and more. Funded in part by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the book includes a companion DVD by filmmaker John Cantu.

Angela Shannon

Singing the Bones Together

$13.95

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.

Mayda Del Valle

South Side Girl’s Guide to Love & Sex

$19.95

As a child of Puerto Rican migrants on Chicago’s Southside, Mayda’s Del Valle’s poetry utilizes part Spanish and English, part hip-hop and salsa, part Nas and Sonia Sanchez, part Shakespeare and John Leguizamo. It is inherited history as well as traditions remixed and invented. Del Valle creates autobiographical narratives that utilize spoken word poetry and music, intended equally for the page and live performance. Rooted in the aesthetics of hip-hop and the urban Latino experience, the poems here explore themes of healing, transformation, and the recovery of ancestral memory in the modern-day diaspora. The beauty of this collection is that the poet manages to curate the flow such that the reader can DJ the poems—arrange their own set and thus, to borrow a phrase from that system, “spin” their own performance.

Gail Wronsky

Stranger You Are

$19.95

A collaboration by a legendary artist and a writer hailed by David St. John as “a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention” Gronk was raised in East Los Angeles and lives in downtown LA. Gail Wronsky was raised in suburban Detroit and lives in the hippie haven of Topanga Canyon. But as artists they have found common ground—a shared commitment to the offbeat and the beautiful, to the slightly absurd and the slyly surreal, to blurring the distinction between our inner lives of dreams and imagination and our daily realities. Wronsky’s poems and Gronk’s drawings are equally grounded in poetic imagery. Wronsky mixes vernacular diction, or spoken language, with a more formal style in a way that is entirely unique; Gronk’s signature style alludes to both street art and classical art. Both are committed to making memorable work that surprises and delights, that sharpens and feeds our everyday lives as well as our deepest selves.

Luivette Resto

Unfinished Portrait

$14.95

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 Luivette 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, Luivette'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.

Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Wandering Song

$19.95

Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint by popular demand this anthology of work by Central American writers living in the United States. The Wandering Song captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latinx groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a US publisher—perfect for high school, college, or university courses in US literature, Latinx literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies. A multi-genre collection featuring poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction, the anthology showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences: of refugees from the wars of the 1980s, of those who barely remember the homeland, and of those who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. It is a community that shares not only a history of violence—both here and back home—but the hope and healing that ensures its survival. The writers include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.

Linda Susan Jackson

What Yellow Sounds Like

$13.95

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.