Blood On The Fog: Pocket Poets Series
A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet's sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate anytowns. Packed with politically astute and clear-eyed takes on race and class, filled with wisdom and great humanity, these poems perform mind-bending leaps and wander down back alleys to arrive at their moment of ultimate truth"--
Biographical Note:Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog, his newest collection of poems, is volume 62 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
Review Quotes:2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry - Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance
Praise for Blood on the Fog:
"Author of the widely-acclaimed Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Eisen-Martin is the current San Francisco Poet Laureate, and this latest collection bursts with frenetic energy, like an encyclopedia of streets on fire. Lyrics dance and span across the page, and it's easy to imagine Eisen-Martin performing any one of these poems in a Bay Area coffeeshop, tea house, bookstore, or dive bar. The verses are also steeped in social and political conflict, and Eisen-Martin rattles off a list of influential and complex figures, from the Black Jacobins to Joseph McCarthy, the formerly enslaved African-American leader Denmark Vesey, and Shango, a Yoruba deity. Lines reverberate and accumulate over the course of long poems, and nearly every one epitomizes the author's intersectional approach, where class and race and politics collide ... Eisen-Martin's collection is militant (without being pedantic), improvisational, and thoroughly captivating."-- Booklist
"The title of Tongo Eisen-Martin's latest collection, Blood on the Fog, is a spring-loaded phrase that moves from concrete image to political and poetic association with all the force of a jack-in-the-box. And what more, really, could you ask of your poet laureate? ... Eisen-Martin's poetry is the kind that people describe as dreamlike and elliptical; it's advanced, nuanced and evocative of its literary forebears."--San Francisco Chronicle
"The poems in Blood on the Fog confront race, inequity, and hope with vivid and transcendent language that inspires liberation. Eisen-Martin writes of fury and love and freedom, recalling his experiences traveling through the varied landscapes of America."--Alta Journal