my hands full of light
Year Forever In My Veins
Faith Holsaert
Year Forever In My Veins is the compelling, first-person poetic testimony of a student activist (SNCC) working to dismantle segregation in the 1960s. “The fearless and selfless voice of a young civil rights worker during a dangerous and violent era.”
ISBN #978-0-9994659-9-8
$9.00
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Corner Shrine
Chloe Martinez
Attuned to both the insights and the limits of visitation, the poems inside Corner Shrine are ripe with scene and sense as they contemplate the wonders of arrival alongside the worries of transience.
ISBN #978-0-9994659-8-1
$9.00
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Winner of the Backbone Press Chapbook Contest!
The Years That Went Missing
Susan Antolin
In The Years That Went Missing, Susan Antolin digs deeply into herself and her experience to carry readers through life’s seasons. Each poem contributes its own narrative tension as the book explores an undercurrent of medical and personal challenges — years that seemingly interrupted a professional career.
ISBN # 978-0-9994659-5-0
$10.00
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Winner of the Backbone Press Haiku Chapbook Contest
The poems are consistently engaging while being honest and forthright, reaching, at last, for a reset button. We may be relieved to be done with the missing years, but value them also.
This One Life
Renée Owen
In This One Life, Renée Owen offers four courses of poems that mark life’s ups and downs. The poet employs a palette of word spices to flavor a sometimes challenging poetic meal, ranging from celebrations of nature to the devastation of the California wild fires—but ending with hope.”
ISBN #978-0-9994659-7-4
$10.00
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American Herstory
celeste doaks
A collection of brilliant poems that speak to and about former First Lady Michelle Obama. Spanning themes of family, art, gardening, and race, they are as lighthearted as they are heavy. American Herstory is the winner of the inaugural Backbone Press Chapbook Award.
ISBN #978-0-9994659-6-7
$9.00
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Ode to the Barbershop
Malcolm Friend
“Ode to the Barbershop” was the winner of the 2016 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize.
$20.00
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Sleep Cycle
Kassidi Jones
“Sleep Cycle” was the first runner-up for the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize.
$20.00
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Between the Shadow & The Soul
Mariam Gomaa
Gomaa’s first chapbook of poetry is elegant yet visceral, a quiet punch. It serves as a map to define womanhood, precisely Muslim womanhood.
ISBN: 978-0-9994659-4-3
$9.00
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Present Values
José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
To confront the moral errors of what is perceived honestly, but is also beloved, respected, and deservedly admired! Present Values is a brave book, as well as an intelligent and beautiful one. I suspect that few people could have written it.
ISBN: 978-0-9994659-3-6
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Mother Said, I Want Your Pain
Naoko Fujimoto
In Naoko Fujimoto’s “Mother Said, I Want Your Pain”, there are rooms without doors nor windows. Time becomes ecstatic and intimate. The reader walks into these rooms allured by the unadorned but skillful language, the spectral beauty of the imagery and the haunting narrative of emptiness.
ISBN: 978-0-9915514-9-1
$9.00
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The Riddle of Longing
Faisal Mohyuddin
In form and free verse, Faisal Mohyuddin delivers truth on behalf of the displaced. In The Riddle of Longing polished and powerfully controlled poems make you want to scream in frustration at the unjust world, but they also enlighten us.
ISBN: 978-0-9994659-0-5
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The Ocean Between Us
Beatriz Fernandez
Beatriz Fernandez artfully weaves together dazzling imagery and alluring sounds to create concrete visions of Puerto Rico, Florida, and a geography of loss. With the ability to use the perfect words to describe imperfect times, she poses questions that pierce the human spirit.
ISBN: 978-0-9994659-1-2
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Drapetomania
Cynthia Parker-Ohene
Like a traditional griot, Cynthia Parker-Ohene creates a world of wonder(ment). “Core Black Lives” are depicted in striking images that highlight places and pieces of history. The poems in Drapetomania are composed of a lush, crisp language that allows the reader to inhabit lands where “sons will not be stopped by 5 0” and where “dna leaches into birchbark.” Raw and polished, truth and sardonic, these poems unabashedly shine “in the stubborn light.”
ISBN: 978-0-9915514-9-1
OUT OF PRINT
E-Version available via PayPal
$4.00
Memory of a Girl
Aozora Brockman
In Memory of a Girl, memory loss is magnified through narrative poems wrought with intimate, familial Japanese terms & cultural customs. There’s the anguish of witnessing and caring for someone losing memories, but along with despair and frustration, Brockman extols the grace, bond, and strength that lingers through debilitation. She is an elegant storyteller.
ISBN: 978-0-9915514-7-7
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Strange-tongued Names
Aaron Counts
With big guts Counts writes poems that are vivid—the language, sometimes a distinct mixture of empathy and gore. On subjects of hip-hop influence, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and his sparse Central District “Love Story” postcard poems, he is resolute in his depictions and accounts of dearth and inner-city blues. Strange-tongued Names represents an eloquent reflection on urban life.
ISBN: 978-0-9915514-8-4
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7 x 7 kwansabas
Tara Betts
7×7 kwansabas brims with flashes of imagery. Words slam into each other as if in a race against time to define the characters she embodies her poems with. She primes her pen, revealing intricate details into the lives of the famous. The likes of Katherine Dunham, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, and Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan rise up on the page, allowing the reader to discover and rediscover them.
ISBN: 978-0-9915514-4-6
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