Books by Naomi Ayala

Wild Animals on the Moon  /  This Side of Early

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Reviews of  Naomi Ayala's 

Wild Animals on the Moon..

Reviews

From the back cover…

“Naomi Ayala writes poems like water, a clear, strong current, sometimes tranquil, sometimes furious, but always swirling with life.”—Martín Espada, Puerto Rican Author

Ayala’s poems are bold, surrealistic, freewheeling.  She plays with placement on the page.  She pares punctuation and capitalization, and often uses enjambment to propel her text forward… Ayala [is] courageous in the agenda she sets for herself: racism, poverty, immigration, relationships and separation, the power of words, the struggles of women, and violence in individual lives, in neighborhoods, and in other countries…  Her voice is at times soft, at times ferocious.  She is a woman who will be heard.”—Margaret Huntington, “Ruptured Lives,” American book review, Nov./Dec. 1998

“Vivid, sharp verse from a Puerto Rican living on the mainland and writing about those on the edge.”—Margo Gutiérrez, Mexican American Library Program, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Selective List of Acquisitions, Spring 1998

“Naomi Ayala is fearless in her debut collection of poetry. She writes about cultural pride with succinct description and clarity. She views turmoil through the eyes of the oppressed [and] gives an identity to the unknown immigrant, the faceless woman… Her strong feminine voice is raised to heroism through expressive and courageous writing… Her poetry has a body that dances, a rhythm… a voice that demands to be heard.”—Speed Reader, Weekly alibi, August 1997  

“These poems explore issues of racial identity, independence, and hope as Ayala explores her experiences of being Puerto Rican on the mainland and all this entails.  Her poems provide powerful free verse testimony to the Puerto Rican experience in this country and hold both literary and social value.”—Midwest Book Review  

“These are very political poems in the sense that Adrienne Rich once said ‘There is no difference between the personal and the political.’” —berniE-zine Reviews

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This Side of Early Poems by Naomi Ayala Naomi Ayala’s poems explore wide-ranging themes in an ever-changing landscape—from the city streets to the introspective solace of the woods. These lyrics deconstruct the political world of man, offer hope through a compelling, lyrical, spiritual intimacy, and bridge the gap between the two with words full of ecological intensity. Her deep connections with the working class combine with a love of the land to offer us lilt and dream, revelation and foretelling. In This Side of Early, Naomi Ayala exhibits astonishing range, proving that great poetry is worth waiting for. Like Whitman, Ayala contains multitudes; she is a poet with an ethereal vision of another world, and a woman with a sweet hope for this one: “Drink from this tree/and ye shall be saved."—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of Red Clay Suite

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Hole                  By Naomi Ayala One morning they dig up the sidewalk and leave. No sign of the truck—only the large, dark shadow digging and digging, piling up sludge with a hand shovel beside the only tree. Two o’clock I come by and he’s slumbering in the grass beside rat holes. Three and he’s stretched across a jagged stonewall, folded hands tucked beneath one ear— a beautiful young boy smiling, not the heavy, large shadow who can’t breathe. Four-thirty and the August heat takes one down here. He’s pulled up an elbow joint some three feet round. At seven I head home for the night, pass the fresh gravel mound, a soft footprint near the manhole like the “x” abuelo would place beside his name all the years he couldn’t write.

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Life on Mars By Tracy K. Smith Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.

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The Last Holiday: A Memoir By Gil Scott Heron Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio)  / Gil Scott-Heron & His Music  Gil Scott Heron Blue Collar  Remember Gil Scott- Heron

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The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

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update 21 April 2012