17 Books Published by Red Hen Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

These sonnets were inspired by the Preludes of Chopin.

Do keys matter? Do they speak to different parts of us? Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these experimental sonnets seek to question timbre and tone. That's bullshit. They are just sonnets.

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X’s life as credo.

Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson, of Roanoke VA 1843, Annotated, from the library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document?a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. A Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

A brave, brilliant debut about the African-American experience in the American Midwest. A contemplation of race, masculinity, religion, and class, Testify in a very personal way confronts some of the most critical issues in today’s society. A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.

Percival Everett, throughout his writing career, has been known to challenge conventional wisdom and play with the fluidity of language, meaning, and narrative structures. In "Trout’s Lie," like in many of his other works, Everett dives deep into the complexities of language, meaning, and interpretation.

The title itself, "Trout’s Lie," might be a play on words, possibly referring to both a falsehood spoken by a trout and the place in a stream where a trout might lie in wait for prey. This duality can serve as a metaphor for the dual nature of language: words have both literal meanings and connotations, and their true meaning can sometimes be elusive, lurking beneath the surface.

When it’s mentioned that Everett "explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense," this could mean that he’s examining how closely related meaningful discourse is to what might initially seem like nonsense. Often, what seems nonsensical at first can, upon deeper examination or in a different context, make perfect sense. Conversely, what seems logical and straightforward can often fall apart under scrutiny.

Furthermore, by questioning "whether either is actually possible," Everett might be challenging the very notions of coherence and incoherence, suggesting that our understanding of the world and our attempts to communicate about it are always, in some way, flawed or incomplete. It’s a reflection on the imperfection of language as a tool for conveying meaning and the inherent ambiguities present in any act of communication.

By playing with these ideas, Everett not only entertains but also prompts readers to think more deeply about the nature of language, the act of interpretation, and the boundaries between sense and nonsense.

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus s dad in competition for Father of the Year; and interrogate the poet s family s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into fatherhood. "

Winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise emerges at a time when science is discovering more and more about the mystical particles that make up our universe and our bodies. From tidal forces and prairie burns to ruminations on racial identity while standing at the foot of Mount Rushmore, these poems chart a travelogue through mental and physical landscapes and suggest that place, time, love, and bodies are all shifts in the u201cundulate cosmos.u201d Straddling the lyrical and experimental, these poems conjure and connect the cosmological, the carnal, and the personal in a country—and a universe—that is gobbling itself into oblivion. But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is in love with the universe of language—its forms, its sounds, and even its static.

These poems question the sounds that are meaning. They interrogate where meaning resides and whether they are in any way, rigidly or loosely, wed to the words that carry it. There is a nod toward logic and at once an acceptance of its limits. These poems are landscapes, the meaning altering with the movement of clouds, with the changing light. Irony sometimes is the way we can be earnest.

There Are No Names for Red is a collaborative work featuring the poetry of Chris Abani and the paintings of Percival Everett.

In the tradition of the Langton Hughes classic Montage of a Dream Deferred, Mitchell L. H. Douglas uses persona poetry to explore the personal and professional struggles of soul legend Donny Hathaway in his debut collection Cooling Board: a Long-Playing Poem. Evoking the sense of listening to a concept album, Douglas presents a narrative in two sides: side one focusing on Hathaway’s development as a young musician and subsequent rise to fame and side two bearing witness to the adversity that plagued his later years. Readers will see Hathaway as true to his family, true to his faith, and uncompromising in his quest for musical innovation.
In a nod to Hathaway’s legacy as a musical trailblazer, Douglas implements a significant poetic innovation in the format of the book. By including alternate versions or “takes” of poems throughout Cooling Board, the reader hears an echo of ideas that can be likened to an album with previously unreleased versions of popular songs. When the poems are revisited in alternate takes, new information emerges, and the reader is forced to consider new interpretations. Along the way, poems resembling liner notes and pop charts enhance the experience, never letting the reader forget that the heart of this ride is the music.
Above all, Douglas’ depiction of Hathaway gives readers the human side of a man who has remained a mystery in the 30 years since his death. Not only does the poet speak in the voices of Hathaway and his long-time collaborator Roberta Flack, the reader also hears the voices of those closest to Hathaway whom we are less familiar with: his mother, Drusella Huntley, his grandmother, Martha Crumwell?Hathaway’s earliest music teacher?and his wife, Eulaulah.
As the book’s first “Liner Notes” poem recognizes, “Cooling Board is about life lessons, the difficult things you don’t always get on the first take.” With Douglas as a guide versed in the power of possessing many tongues, Cooling Board captures its reader like the best Hathaway song: passionately, honestly, and with an undeniable sense of purpose.

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear,some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

Here are the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative force of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths.

(Note to Seller: DOG7)

The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman — the power of her ties to family, husband and her "adopted" country, Nigeria — as well as the illumination of her own soul and that of the narrator’s) fills the reader with both sorrow and wonder. It is an instructive tale for our age — its vision of the individual will and imagination resisting the madness of politics and the destruction of war is singular and profound. (Description by Carol Muske-Dukes)

The Darker Face of the Earth, the first full-length play by Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove, is an Oedipal tragedy of interracial love set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina. The play has enjoyed staged readings on Broadway and full stage productions at the Kennedy Center and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This completely revised second edition coincided with the 1996 world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Dramatic readings of The Darker Face of the Earth were initially staged on Broadway."Poet Laureate Dove has done an amazing thing…her placement of the tale of Oedipus within the context of slavery and its open secret of miscegenation is brilliant, potent, and repercussive."-Booklist (starred review)"…a brooding and in some ways shocking piece that mixes Greek and African mythology and dramatic communication to reveal the tragedy of slavery."-The Christian Science Monitor"The play not only reminds the audience of history’s relevance to the present day, but it also allows a deeper understanding of how slavery’s cost continues to exact its cruel payments…The Darker Face of the Earth is an important play."-World Literature Today"Dove has created a drama in which black and white Americans are bound together not only by the chains of history, and not only by the necessity of sharing this land, but by ties of blood and passion as well."-Detroit Free Press

The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by the poet laureate of the United States, creates a human drama of classical proportions. Behind the facade of antebellum Southern plantation life unfolds a mysterious tale of interracial love and strife, guilt and suffering, as both slave and master struggle against a fate that threatens to eclipse them altogether.