City Lights Books

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books & Library Journal's Big Books of the Year"A poet's immersion in Greek classicism forges a stronger bond with her bloodline. . . . A moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred ReviewA genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry. In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women. A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about. Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs. This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.

Why are there so few public monuments honoring women? Unsung Heroines shows it's time to claim that space!Women are grossly underrepresented in all of the Bay Area's public spaces, but not because they didn't exist! Did you know about Charlotte Brown, a Black woman in San Francisco who in 1863 took the city's transportation system to court for forcibly removing her from a streetcar, and won her landmark case? How about the first Chinese-American woman to register to vote, Clara Chan Lee, who went on to start the Chinese Women's Self-Reliance Association? Or Barbara May Cameron, a Native American writer, photographer, and activist who co-founded the first gay American Indian liberation organization? How many other notable women who deserve public recognition have been written out of the history of our regio? rawn from award-winning journalist Rae Alexandra's KQED Arts & Culture series, "Rebel Girls From Bay Area History," Unsung Heroines is a collection of 35 short profiles honoring the contributions of a diverse group of women from San Francisco, the East Bay, and the greater Bay Area, from the very first years of the founding of San Francisco to the present day. Educators and organizers, adventurers and entertainers, these inspiring women had a profound impact on our region. Together, their stories constitute a new telling of the history of Northern California from the vantagepoint of women who made a difference. A reader's perspective will be permanently altered by the realization of just how many of these untold stories have been lost to time, encouraging them to scan their own environment for traces of women whose stories deserve to be recovered and told.

Mothering always comes at a price, paid by women regardless of their means."Daniela Rea''s Fruto is a calm room late at night where women gather to talk: with their stories and their words they take care of each other and then, by sharing that, they care for all of us."—Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking "A book of great patience, empathy, and honesty about mothering and being mothered, and about the revolutionary act of caring. I was profoundly moved."—Aysegül Savas, author of The AnthropologistsAfter the birth of her first child, the relentless work of motherhood left award-winning Mexican journalist, Daniela Rea feeling overwhelmed, despairing, and afraid of losing her identity. She took up the tools of her trade and began a series of interviews with other women, some mothers, some caregivers. As she listened to their experiences of providing care for others, sometimes under extreme circumstances, she began to find a place and a meaning for her own story.Fruto examines the personal and social contradictions of care. Fourteen voices weave in and around Rea''s own, punctuated by diary entries from her first days of motherhood and reflections on her upbringing that are sparked by a lengthy interview with her own mother. Throughout, she engages with an international women''s chorus of philosophers and feminists, poets and essayists, and the result is a compelling page turner that chronicles a journey of listening in search for meaning.

One of Lit Hub''s most Anticipated Poetry Books !Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions."Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive."—Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My EarBorn in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.This is Rabah''s first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah''s poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one''s relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates—sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair—the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What's Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between.

The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL & Other Poems! HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print. A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to "Howl," poems in the book include: "A Supermarket in California," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," "Transcription of Organ Music," and "Wild Orphan," among others. A History of HOWL: City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg's performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?" When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of "redeeming social significance." The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.