ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
www.nathanielturner.com
maybe my insomnia is contagious / or maybe it’s just the dreams I choose
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Before Becoming Historical
By Yictove
I was chewing on my celebrity
like a king
like a slave
as sweetness of click lights
bathed night sky all around us
everyone was wearing
polished jewelry and speaking
wisely
moon was poetic as it always is
river flowed in its correct direction
I was thinking about you for a change
and not myself
I was crazy today so
I looked in a mirror and imagined
you there instead of me
someone must have paid a fortune
for this world we live in because
it’s so big and beautiful
someone must have gotten cheated
cause we don’t love each other so much
maybe my insomnia is contagious
or maybe it’s just the dreams I choose
to dream that’s got me like this
peaceful on the outside
nervous on the inside
once we become historical and someone
anyone
tries to remember sound of our individual
voices
how we sounded when we were children
how we sounded when we were angry
how we sounded when we were making
love or reading a poem
and
as much as we try
we just cannot recall all those intricate
inflections
this is music baby and I’m singing to you
like this is the last day I’ll ever know you
posted 16 May 2007
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From the one book of his I have, a Blue Print, of a life seemingly quickly lived but deeply felt. Yictove became a coordinator of readings at the Knitting Factory and at the East Orange Public Library.
Soft spoken, introverted it would seem, appearing, disappearing, yet leaving his trace, singular, but like all of us, leaving traces, prints of our blues our blues lives. Now the brother follows the 9th Ward of his native Big Easy, deeply appreciated but now part of the legend of what we took for granted some of the things that made us happy, now gone gone gone.Amiri Baraka 8/1/07
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I will always remember the artistic genius that lived in my brother. The way that he made words have new life from the written to the spoken word was something of an art in and of itself. As he spoke his voice boomed and oozed giving words new meaning. The Knitting Factory and the Library (East Orange Public Library) gave him the opportunity to help others grow and cultivate in the arts he so loved. He was a gentle teacher and had a gift with people of all walks of life. Not long ago he was in New Orleans and performed with Kid Jordans band an impromptu jam session where he read When the Dewdrop Drops. Though the performance was not rehearsed it was amazing in every sense, exemplifying the artist he truly was.
Consuello Battin: Sister
Source: D.J. Soliloquy (Thrown Stone Press, 1988)
This “Brother/Man” from New Orleans who has touched spirits on one shore and the next has come touch base with ours.
He speaks of the conditions that are within our control, and the necessity for some changes of the urgency in the need to learn to learn how to truly love ourselves in order to be free enough to open up and learn to love each other. Offering no panacea, he speaks of the reality of the hard work intrinsic in the finding of solutions. He is a believer in the wondrous results of honest attempts at communications with our lovers, families and friends–a direct path to broader communications with our people–A.H. Reynolds
Yictove has produced/hosted a poetry series on cable in Newark, New Jersey, performed as a poet in the schools courtesy of the Geraldine Dodge Foundation, worked as a creative writing instructor in the Safe Haven Program/YMCA in East Orange, New Jersey, and directed as poetry series in New York City’s Knitting Factory. Cover art: Lorraine Williams
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AALBC.com’s 25 Best Selling Books
Fiction
#1 – Justify My Thug by Wahida Clark #2 – Flyy Girl by Omar Tyree #3 – Head Bangers: An APF Sexcapade by Zane #4 – Life Is Short But Wide by J. California Cooper #5 – Stackin’ Paper 2 Genesis’ Payback by Joy King #6 – Thug Lovin’ (Thug 4) by Wahida Clark #7 – When I Get Where I’m Going by Cheryl Robinson #8 – Casting the First Stone by Kimberla Lawson Roby #9 – The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane
#10 – Covenant: A Thriller by Brandon Massey
#11 – Diary Of A Street Diva by Ashley and JaQuavis
#12 – Don’t Ever Tell by Brandon Massey
#13 – For colored girls who have considered suicide by Ntozake Shange
#14 – For the Love of Money : A Novel by Omar Tyree
#15 – Homemade Loves by J. California Cooper
#16 – The Future Has a Past: Stories by J. California Cooper
#17 – Player Haters by Carl Weber
#18 – Purple Panties: An Eroticanoir.com Anthology by Sidney Molare
#19 – Stackin’ Paper by Joy King
#20 – Children of the Street: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery by Kwei Quartey
#21 – The Upper Room by Mary Monroe
#22 Thug Matrimony by Wahida Clark
#23 – Thugs And The Women Who Love Them by Wahida Clark
#24 – Married Men by Carl Weber
#25 – I Dreamt I Was in Heaven – The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by Leonce Gaiter
Non-fiction
#1 – Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable #2 – Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans #3 – Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love by Zane #4 – Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny by Hill Harper #5 – Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You’re Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant #6 – Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey by Marcus Garvey #7 – The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda DeKnight #8 – The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by Frances Cress Welsing #9 – The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
#10 – John Henrik Clarke and the Power of Africana History by Ahati N. N. Toure
#11 – Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure by Tavis Smiley
#12 –The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
#13 – The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life by Kevin Powell
#14 – The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
#15 – Why Men Fear Marriage: The Surprising Truth Behind Why So Many Men Can’t Commit by RM Johnson
#16 – Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire by Carol Jenkins
#17 – Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority by Tom Burrell
#18 – A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
#19 – John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard
#20 – Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris
#21 – Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife by Carleen Brice
#22 – 2012 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino #23 – Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul by Tom Lagana #24 – 101 Things Every Boy/Young Man of Color Should Know by LaMarr Darnell Shields
#25 – Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson
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 Prizewinning 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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Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label ‘trafficked’ does not accurately describe migrants’ lives and that the ‘rescue industry’ serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. “Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality.”Lisa Adkins, University of London
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The White Masters of the World
From The World and Africa, 1965
W. E. B. Du Bois Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson / Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804 / January 1, 1804 — The Founding of Haiti
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update 12 December 2011
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