JAMES CAGNEY at Books Inc. Alameda

Books Inc. Alameda is thrilled to welcome Bay Area poet, James Cagney as he joins the Book of Light Poetry Series to read from his new collection, Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive.

The Japanese word 'koan' is a seemingly unanswerable riddle used by practitioners of Zen Buddhism to trigger spiritual enlightenment and understanding.

In his new collection Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, James Cagney shows us how an understanding of the modern koan requires a surrealist eye with a nod to a narcotic based frenzy just underneath the dissociation of everyday survival. Moments of grace and light punctuate deftly laid out hood settings. The poet chronicles a "gone" world that isn't really gone, still preserved by an Oakland which functions as its own museum of humanity. These are the tales of the forgotten, quiet hustlers...not con artists...but real, breathing, blue collar hustlers whose lives have been shoehorned into the influence industry against their own dreams. Cagney illuminates these lives "into cleanliness beneath a flagellating sun." In reinventing the koan he also reinvents the villanelle, letting the voices of Oakland, California, Texas and ultimately our future take over the poems inside, all while wrapped inside a loose formalism. In revolutionizing form and voice, Cagney, whose poetic gifts were already considerable, is showing us there is no roof on how high his voice can rise. We can only hope, for our sakes, that he continues this evolution, and that we are ready for it. --Paul Corman-Roberts, author of Bone Moon Palace and 19th Street Station, Vol. 2

James Cagney is an African American poet currently living in Oakland, Ca. He authored two poetry collections: Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory and MARTIAN: The Saint of Loneliness. His books won the 2021 James Laughlin Award from Academy of American Poets and the 2019 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. His poems have appeared in Alta, Zyzzyva, Poetry Daily, Best American Poetry 2022, Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures, Powerful, Black Powerful: Black Voices Reimagine Revolution, Beat Not Beat, Civil Liberties United and Colossus: Home, among others.

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