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Birth language
Aimee Suzara's second full-length book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree. The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquista...
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Singing the bones together
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. S...
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Flood
“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, ope...
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Talisman
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 do...
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Relief of america
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 l...
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Dream of a word
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 ...
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Armadillo charm
Poetry encompassing Chicano life by Chicago publisher of MARCH/Abrazo.
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My sweet unconditional
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 f...
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Leaving gary
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 pumpk...
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Shards of light/astillas de luz
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, bo...
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Painkiller
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 a...
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Place of the white heron
Tia Chucha Press is honored to announce The Place of the White Heron, our first novel after thirty-four years of publishing poetry collections and anthologies. By renowned Chicano writer and scholar Alejandro Morales, the book is a parable for the twenty-first century, an allegory of the violence...
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American jesus
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...
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Mean days
Anne-Marie Cusac's first collection is an edgy, meticulously written exploration on the experience and voices of women.
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We are all the black boy
We Are All the Black Boy is a searing work of our time. Full of venom, full of hope, it is an evocative wordscape, tearing down barriers and probing the humanity in each of us. No holds barred poetry. A full appetite of insatiable truth.
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Loves of ricardo
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 barefo...
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Show me the bells
Xochiquetzal Candelaria's second book, Show Me the Bells, celebrates ecological, political, and social change amidst the crush of late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the Nahuatl concept of Nepantla, the collection mobilizes imagery, music, and silences to awaken our real and raw memories and to ...
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Looking for a soft place to land
Looking for a Soft Place to Land is a poetry book that weaves together freedom, love, despair, and politics.
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Rushing waters, rising dreams
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...
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Exquisite politics
The French Surrealists invented a game called "Exquisite Corpse" to write collaborative poems, and thus the title of Denis Duhamel and Maureen Seaton's new collection, Exquisite Politics, hints at its collaborative nature. In poems that speak at times in a breezy, conversational style, and at oth...
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Raised by humans
The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miranda, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it ...
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Good morning, aztlan
ouie Pérez is a master musician and innovative visual artist who has spent the last forty years as founding member and principal songwriter for the internationally acclaimed group Los Lobos. Working with his songwriting partner, David Hidalgo, Pérez has written more than four hundred songs. Many ...
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Powerlines
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.
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Double tongues
Double Tongues speaks of a world where friends share stories of terror as they cross a quiet park, where death is a trick of light and where a loud radio briefly transforms the waiting room of a jail into a plaza filled with music and dancing. Mary Hawley's poetry celebrates the forces of nature ...
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Dreams in soy sauce
From Soweto to Chicago, the Middle Passage to the Final Solution, from intimate letters to scathing parodies, Dreams in Soy Sauce bristles and bubbles with verve, wit, intellect and honesty. In linguistically deft but accessible poetry, Preston singes the soul in his quest for wholeness.
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Shallow end of sleep
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 so...
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Honor comes hard
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 incar...
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Stranger you are
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 art...
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Night song
Night Song is a poetry book about Latin American life in the Midwest.
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Heart's migration
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...
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Jangle
Jangle is a collection of poems written by National Poetry Slam Champion Lisa Buscani.
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South side girl’s guide to love & sex
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 ...
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Body of life
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 wo...
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Frozen accident
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 po...
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Fallout
Fallout is a poetry book about growing up in Japan and living in the United States.
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Coming home in viet nam
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 jour...
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Counting time like people count stars
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 res...
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Crossing with the light
Nominated for Best Asian American Literature Book by the Association for Asian American Studies Crossing with the Light is a poetry book including titles “When Frank Walks In,” “Where the Boys Were,” “Mysteries of a Bowling Alley,” and “Letters I Never Wrote.”
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Wandering song
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...
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How fire is a story, waiting
Melinda Palacio’s newest poetry collection creates images that are at once heartbreaking and humorous. She tackles elemental subjects of family and childhood with the same depth and grace as that of myth making and death. As the only child of a mother who died too young, she infuses her words wit...
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Bless the ashes
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, actua...
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Blues narratives
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,...
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Falling wallendas
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 publ...
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From trouble to triumph
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 t...
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These spaceships weren’t built for us
“Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine. He points our gaze to the sky and we long to take flight while simultaneously holding onto our roots and what keeps our feet on the ground."—Joseph Rios, Fresno Poet Laureate and author of Shadowboxing: ...
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Love's instruments
One of two collections of poetry by poet, novelist, and educator Melvin Dixon, whose worked chronicled the lives of black gay men. He died of HIV-related illnesses in 1992.
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Poems across the pavement
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,...
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Life according to motown
In the 1960s, the live of black children were shaped by the glittery specter of Motown--a world of furious flash, undeniable glamour, and impossible romantic ideals. Some discovered the truth before it was too late. Others still drape their blues in the silken sounds, swirling in dimly-lit rooms ...
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Dancing in your mother's skin
Dancing in Your Mother's Skin is a book of poetry by Jean Howard and striking black and white photos by Alice Q. Hargrave.
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Mucha muchacha, too much girl
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 b...
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Ascension
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 relation...
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Bum town
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.
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You come singing
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. T...
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Femme du monde
These are poems of positions and relationships, shifting angles on received wisdom or cultural cliché, 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 (...
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Make a poem cry
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. Rodríguez, sponsored by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. Rodríguez, who is Tia Chucha Press’s founding editor, and formerly incarcerat...
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Desire zoo
Alison Luterman’s eye is on women, on children, in the streets and in the woods. Or at home alone in front of a desk. Her arms envelop love in whatever form it shows up: a cup of coffee from her husband, or the curve of a pregnant woman’s belly as she walks around the lake in flip-flops. Luterman...
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Rise
Winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award In this superb and eagerly anticipated debut collection by the young African American poet A. Van Jordan, the energy and music of Jordan's language, his honesty of feeling and of truth telling, are matched by his freshness and power. His stuff shine...
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Cipota under the moon
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 parall...
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Same blue chevy
This first book of poems powerfully illustrates the power of place in shaping our histories and perceptions. Moving from the prairie to the city and back again, Walden draws the reader through the living rooms and main streets of a past in constant flux. Each poem is a canvas saturated with grace...
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4-headed woman
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 throughou...
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Coiled serpent
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...
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In the courtyard of the moon
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 d...
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Unfinished portrait
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 d...
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What yellow sounds like
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 ...
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Nostalgia for a trumpet
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, ta...
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Armageddon of funk
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,” rigi...
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Open fist
Editor Anne Schultz presents a collection of works by the best of Illinois's young poets.
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