Synopses & Reviews
2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry - Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance
2022 California Book Award Finalist
Politically astute, filled with wisdom and great humanity, this is poetry meant to conjure a healing and provoke a confrontation, an invitation to a journey through Black America.
"Words are not the revolution itself, Eisen-Martin seems to say, and yet this book disturbed me more than any other I read this year. It reminds me that poetry can rewire our thinking — can actually change our minds — by using nothing like the rote language we're so used to hearing in speech and in prose. It can jolt us out of patterns, back into intelligence." The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2021"
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. Radical, outraged, knowing, wry, and deeply humane, these are poems of survival that soar with a vision of collective liberation.
Review
"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
Review
"Sonically complex and visually unforgettable poems that resist summarization or easy description." Chicago Review of Books
Review
"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." San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
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.