11 Books Published by Four Way Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

In the book’s eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, “How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?" Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content — observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice — but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love.

As Rachel Eliza Griffiths notes, Montilla’s “powers orbit and intuit the lives of Philando Castile, Captain America, Christian Cooper, Karl Marx, Ahmaud Arbery, Eartha Kitt, and many more while stitching our wounded identities, memories, and histories in defiant poems of revision and joyous reclamation.” The vertebral odes of this collection at turns uplift desire, affirm life, celebrate protest, and condemn the violent greed of imperial usurpation that has produced the U.S. as we know it. Both in its criticism and its admiration, Muse Found in a Colonized Body calls upon its readers to rise to the occasion of these lyrics’ profound care.

John Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular "man in blue"—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: "It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself." In "Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum," the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an "infant’s small mouth" as well as the "sad calculator" that was "built to subtract from and divide a town." In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the "other" and locates us squarely within these personae.

Poetry. African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. “Up jumps the boogie. That’s almost all one needs to say. Murillo is headbreakingly brilliant. I didn’t have a favorite poet for this year: Now I do. But with this kind of verve and intelligence and ferocity Murillo just might be a favorite for many years to come.”—Junot Díaz

“The feel of now lives in John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie, but it’s tempered by bows to the tradition of soulful music and oral poetry. The lived dimensions embodied in this collection say that here’s an earned street knowledge and a measured intellectual inquiry that dare to live side by side, in one unique voice. The pages of Up Jump the Boogie breathe and sing; the tributes and cultural nods are heartfelt, and in these honest poems no one gets off the hook.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

Hatter’s artful, moving novel looks closely at the murder of a young black woman and her family’s devastation. Old?and new?questions about race and civil rights in 21st Century America arise alongside the unfolding story of Malawi and those who live in the wake of her loss.

There are strong social justice themes related to the body throughout the book, and personas attempting to recover from different forms of betrayal. I’m going to some hard places, hence the title of homage to one of the best to ever write about difficult things with grace and power, Lucille Clifton.” –Kamilah Aisha Moon

“These are poems of elegy, justice, citizenship, and something altogether unearthly. Moon writes with wisdom, rage and grace of the slain, the stolen and the conquered. These are poems with the force to wake those of us ‘standing in line waiting as if life is business as usual.’ I find myself utterly ravaged and unreservedly restored.” –Tracy K. Smith

“Kamilah Aisha Moon’s unrelenting and gorgeous Starshine & Clay shows exactly why she is the poet we need in tough times like now. She is a fearless writer, one who finds unexpected music in our contemporary terrarium of violence. With persistent grace, Moon balances sensitivity to the world with enough fortitude to stare our cruel, collective histories in the face. These poems are testaments to lives lived and taken unjustly.These poems are full of the truths we don’t want to admit to—that brutality and suffering go beyond geography and race. That violence is more than a human episode. It’s the foundation for the way we unsee each other, whether in America, Nigeria, or what is now the Czech Republic. This is a poet who tells it like it is, but with a deftness of image & the kind of stunning wit that can make the most difficult moments visceral and rewarding.” —Adrian Matejka

We are making our lives up “here on this bridge / between starshine and clay” (Lucille Clifton). Addressing tough circumstances tenderly, this book is about life—what we inherit, what we create, what shapes us, what’s possible.

Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world. We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world a world that is both bright and dark.

From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.

With unrelenting yet tender honesty, She Has a Name tells the story of a young woman with autism from multiple points of view. The speakers in these poems—sisters, mother, father, teacher—seek to answer questions science can’t yet answer, seek to protect the young woman, and seek to understand what autism means to their own lives as well.

Channeling the collection’s muse, jazz composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, Hemming the Water speaks to the futility of trying to mend or straighten a life that is constantly changing. Here the spiritual and the secular comingle in a “Fierce fragmentation, lonely tune.” Harvey inhabits, challenges, and explores the many facets of the female self—as daughter, mother, sister, wife, and artist. Every page is rich with Harvey’s rapturous music.