ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
www.nathanielturner.com 
And his song changed “I’m not a nice person” / he chanted “I’m not / I’m not a nice person”
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C. K. Williams
(1936- )
Born in Newark, New Jersey, C.K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Repair (1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997), A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). Williams is also a translator: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling (Poems from Issa) (1998); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978).
Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.
Randall Jarrell famously compared the likelihood of writing a good poem to that of being struck by a meteor. If that’s the case, C.K. Williams has been defying the odds for almost 20 years, ever since he published Tar . That collection, which appeared in 1983, marked the debut of his poetic signature: the lengthy, elaborately discursive line, packed to the gills with novelistic detail. And since then, with Flesh and Blood and The Vigil , he’s only refined his methods. At times Williams seems to be working that no man’s land between prose and verse, daring us to read him as a rococo Raymond Carver–an Ash Can School unto himself. But he always manages to pull one more syntactical miracle from his hat, reminding us that he’s a poet after all, and a superlative one.
James Marcus
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The Singing I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with their burgeoning forth When a young man turned in from a corner singing no it was more of a cadenced shouting Most of which I couldn’t catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black It didn’t matter I could tell he was making his song up which pleased me he was nice-looking Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself hence his lyrical flowing over We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and “Big” He shouted-sang “Big” and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked in fact pointedly away And his song changed “I’m not a nice person” he chanted “I’m not I’m not a nice person” No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat but he did want to be certain I knew That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it That’s all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to me again he arrived Where he was going a house where a girl in braids waited for him on the porch that was all No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions were left where they were It occurred to me to sing back “I’m not a nice person either” but I couldn’t come up with a tune Besides I wouldn’t have meant it nor he have believed it both of us knew just where we were In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something is watching and listening Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem (poetry Manuscript)
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AALBC.com’s 25 Best Selling Books
For July 1st through August 31st 2011
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
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
By Charles C. Mann
Im a big fan of Charles Manns previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Its exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that its anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, Im proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, globalized entity.
Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.
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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
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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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posted 3 April 2010
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