Bøger af Martin Wiley

A coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world around him, he seeks to "remember / just when I stopped being cute..." Narrating run-ins with the police ("The minute they see me, fear me") and confrontations with himself, the speaker in this collection must learn to navigate a world that sees him as a threat. When Did We Stop Being Cute? reflects on the beauty and horrors of life in the United States, telling a personal story that shows Black lives and how they matter.

If you hear Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes singing through this tender howl of rage, it's because in 21st Century America Martin Wiley, the poet and paterfamilias, just wants to goof around with his kids, but there's a brutal war on Black bodies outside his door so he still has to wake up in the heavy morning not wanting "to know/how we died last night."-Jeff Conant, father, and author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista InsurgencyIf "every word is a war" on the news, these poems are daisies in the guns pointed at us on the daily. Like a cousin to Baraka's suicidal preface in 1961, this long song meditates on how children fill the gaps in our broken hearts and light the way to our backstories.-Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, 3rd Poet Laureate of Philadelphia