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  • General Recommendations
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Poetry as Revolution: San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin

San Francisco native son Tongo Eisen-Martin is a frontline educator and activist who uses his voice to explode the status quo, resist, organize and raise consciousness. In dreamy, mystic jazz-like poetry, both piercing and uplifting, he confronts gentrification, urban decay, mass incarceration and violence against black people by the state. An essential voice of our time, he has taught in prisons across the United States as well as the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. His work has received the American Book Award, California Book Award, and the National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year.

Library Staff
User from San Francisco Public Library

5 items

  • Heaven Is All Goodbyes

    Eisen-Martin, Tongo,
    Winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry, this revolutionary collection will shake you awake. In his surrealistic, mystic, unique voice, Eisen-Martin observes the California landscape where sprawl, suburban decay, and the post-industrial,…
    Book, 2017San Francisco : City Lights Books, [2017] — 811.6 Ei831h

  • Someone's Dead Already

    Eisen-Martin, Tongo,
    This slim volume captures the turbulent, shifting times with a liberating, sly, trickster quality.
    Book, 2015Oakland, CA : Bootstrap Press, 2015. — 811.6 Ei831s

  • The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

    Eisen-Martin is featured in this anthology.
    Book, 2018Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. — 818.6 B464 2018

  • Graffiti

    This collection of work by artists of color features Eisen-Martin's poems Cut A Hand From A Hand, may we all refuse to die at the same time and Channels to Fall Asleep to.
    Book, 2019San Francisco, CA : Aunt Lute Books, [2019] — 810.8092 G758