Bøker i Crossroads Poetry-serien

One of the Midwest’s finest slam poets, Osayande brings his work to the written page and delivers a lyric exploration of everyday life in Detroit in his debut full-length collection Class. In his voice you can hear and feel the lineage of some of Detroit’s finest poetic voices, stretching back to David Blair, Murray Jackson, and Naomi Long Madgett. He captures the rhythms, images, and deepest meditations of life both hardscrabble and painfully beautiful in a fashion that calls us to know that survival is much more about living than cowering in fear. As a teacher Osayande brings us before his classrooms, let’s us linger on the experiences and moments of growing up in a city that feels lost amidst the promises of America, and takes us through the high cost of being black in a place where the colour of one’s skin can deliver a trauma that only the strongest can survive. His poems show us the Detroit that has always been here. Both heartbreaking and empowering the poems in this collection ask the reader to consider the America that is kept hidden from Prime Time television, that carries on because it must, and understands that the act of speaking is the best therapy and resistance that one can offer to a world given at best to indifference and at worst insidious violence.

Kenneth Pobo’s seventh collection of poetry, Booking Rooms in Kuiper Belt, brings the reader from the Earth through the solar system and back with an uproarious lyric tour through otherworldly bodies and the everyday of life on earth. Bejewelled with homages to some of literature’s greats and with the beauty of our everyday world, Pobo’s collection holds out a consistent loving nod to our world and beyond.  

In Mark Luebbers debut poetry collection, he frames his discussion with the condition of "flat light." A condition that makes it more difficult to see surfaces and details in contrast, distorts distances, and reduces color values. In order to see well in flat light, one must learn to see "without eyes." And in these poems Luebbers uses this more encompassing poetic vision to reconsider boundaries between wildlife and humanity,the depth of artists and their lives, and the manner that all of it touches the familiarity of our lives.

In this collaborative poetic endeavour, Benjamin Goluboff (Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse) and Mark Luebbers (Flat Light) project the lives of eclectic and memorable people through speculative biography. Renowned in their use of this poetic style, here we see the likes Robert Frank, Bill Evans, Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, and others in imagined glimmers from their lives. In unique work that follows in the line of Spoon River Anthology, we are invited along for poetic experience that couples historical fact with deep-dive lyric experience. These are poems of experience, ones that let readers feel and hear and witness history in a way that makes it very real, almost personal, and leaves a lasting memory and lingering feelings.