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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Freedom


 Now Available

    Vagabond is pleased to announce the launch of Freedom, by Woodrow Bailey.

    Freedom is a courageous collection that challenges what it means to be truly free in a country plagued by systemic racism, dilapidated social services, power-hungry politics, and beyond.  Each poem photographs the human experience of fighting to keep hope alive despite the painful repercussions of America's brutalities against marginalized communities. Freedom's honest poetic journalism braves the quest for a future of unshackled joy and the might to infinitely dream. Only a poet like Woodrow Bailey can turn the rage of injustice into a liberation of truth through the power of the pen.


 
  Available Nationally on December 1st.

 Order your copy today.

Only $15!

 
 
"Freedom is the vivid reality of under-resourced and underrepresented communities that struggle with cycles of addiction, lack generational wealth, and suffer due to numerous inequities and injustices at the hands of the systems that are supposed to protect them. Bailey puts himself at the center of witnessing individuals’ stories and telling the raw truth about the violence and lack of empathy these individuals face daily. Freedom is the American journey that we’ve been missing from history books."

Andres Sanchez
Author of This Body
 
 
"Freedom is a raw, untamed collection of exquisite poems from Woodrow Bailey, who is widely known among we poets for his love and criticism of his community.  Straddling the line between honesty and eloquence, as all poetry should, this book attests to the true meaning of Freedom, which can only be discovered if you read every line, and wrestle with every sentence. The collection is reminiscent of Marvin Gaye's album, "What's Going On" begging us to wake up from our sleep and take a critical look at the world around us, and search ourselves for the willingness to change it. If poems have the power to hold you accountable for making significant change, then these are those poems, which are full of light and sight." 
 
Hiram Sims 
Founder of the Sims Library of Poetry 
 
 


 
 

Revolutionary Vision


 Now Available

    New work from the League of Revolutionaries for a New America is here. Dedicated to the legendary poet and friend, Jack Hirschman, this anthology, Revolutionary Vision (Toward the Cultural Offense), chronicles the leading social justice voices of our age, directly out of the LRNA Cultural Conference, with both poetry and prose, touching on the most important issues of today.

    Contributors include such great voices as Jack Hirschman, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nancy Morejón, Matt Sedillo, devorah major, Michael Warr, and many more.

 

 

Order your copy today.

Only $15

 

In 2009 four members of the LRNA formed the

Revolutionary Poets Brigade, which multiplied

in succeeding years so that there are now 5

Brigades in the United States, 2 in France and

5 more in Italy.

 

Prose reportages of the activities of the people

economically is NOT enough.

 

Poetry is the key to the future communalizing

by way of human feelings and the heart.

 

It is a key to the successful educating on the

meaning of the New Class.

 

Because EVERYONE lives poetically within

him or her self, along with the dream of a

communist world that is the ground of the

imagination’s most affirmative dimension.

 ~ Jack Hirschman         

 

 

 

  
 

Monday, April 18, 2022

Rainbow Weather


Coming Soon...

RAINBOW WEATHER

by John Curl 

These poems are songs for the road ahead, as climate change transforms how we live on earth. Today we find ourselves hurled all too soon into a future where all living things must adapt, and human society must change rapidly in order to survive. We have no choice. We must change the ways we live. Through poetry, the art of words, destructive energy can be dispersed and transformed into constructive energy. We're in a long-term and short-term social and cultural crisis, with the fate of our planet at stake. This is a time for poetry.

People have such a long history of destruction, yet at the same time people have also always risen from the depths of despair, overcome the challenges of their time and reshaped the world. If we go back far enough, we all have ancestors who lived in good, sustainable ways, respectful to their environment and to their neighbors. Only history will know how human society will look when this century is passed.  This is a century for poetry.

The climate crisis marks the end of a cycle that began with the industrial revolution. Since every ending also marks a new beginning, here are some capsules of energy to take with you into the new beginning, energy in the form of poems, poems to transform the world by unleashing the power in words.   

~ John Curl

 

Pre-order your copy today

at a special discount ... only $15

 (Get your copy now before the official launch.)

In the poem Making the Invisible Visible John Curl could be describing the work of poets. It is so much easier to expect the details of the world than to actually see them. The poems in Rainbow Weather challenge the reader to release expectation and received hierarchies and in exchange, to retrieve wonder. Current circumstances being what they are, the treatment for collective malaise is probably complicated, a combination of things with many moving parts, but somewhere in that combination  there is certainly space for the calm, understanding observations in this poetry collection. Curl's poems stand with grace, sing with power, and may be part of the cure.

 

~ Kim Shuck

7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita


With a single, ancient, unfashionable word, “Lo,” John Curl changes the game plan of the planet: “Lo! The circle is drawn around us. / The candle is lit. The power of water enters….” “Now,” he argues, is “the ancient boiling point…now/ the ancient flash point of rebellion.” These poems are not so much a call to arms as they are a call to thought—and, beyond thought, to action. “Every place is the center of the world, / and everywhere is our place of origin.” At a moment of confusion on all levels, Curl realizes (and makes us realize) that the ancient, despised, mostly ignored art of poetry is the key to recovery. As the Trumperians know, words can shock. Words can heal, too.

 ~ Jack Foley

author of When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs


John Curl’s passionate, heartfelt poems for the Earth in Rainbow Weather are wake-up calls announcing the environmental atrocities that surround us: clear-cut forests, pollution, radioactive waste, ubiquitous plastic. He doesn’t turn away from any of this, but pleads instead to see everything more clearly: “Let the scales / fall from my eyes. / Lift the veil. / Awake, arise!” And this brings hope, for once the scales and veils are removed, both he and we are bathed in “the healing light of reality.”

 

~ Lucille Lang Day,

coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California

and author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place