2 Books Published by NYQ Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

ATTRAVERSIAMO, Monique Ferrell’s third collection of poetry, is an examination of a life in progress. It includes twenty-seven new poems that focus on the importance and impact of living within a skin that is both Black and female. Readers will find poetry that revisits local, national, and international tragedies; discussions about the power, "privilege," and pain of living as a woman in America; and an examination of what it means to survive, stand up, and willingly walk through to the other side. ATTRAVERSIAMO is a poetic discussion about transformation and why survival, thoughtful consideration, and life matter.

Poetry. African American Studies. MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM is a blues memoir in verse. With brutal honesty and lyrical prowess, Tony Medina plays the changes in an intimate collection that sticks like a stinging Ali punch and moves like a New York City subway train through the raw, unmitigated terrain of his psyche. Sparked by the sudden death of his father in Harlem, MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM examines his relationship with a long-lost mother who abandoned him at birth, exploring his Bronx projects childhood and his relationship with the paternal grandmother who wrestled him from the clutches of the State and raised him, culminating with a reunion with his terminally ill mother, attempting to fill in the gaps of a precarious past destined to collide with its bare-bones present. In this, his fifth full-length collection, Tony Medina is at his most personal and revelatory.