A book of visionary works, Solar Poems is the first English translation of a single volume of poems by Mexico’s famed poet-activist, Homero Aridjis, exploring political consciousness as well as the psychological unconscious. Reflecting his ecological concerns and a mystical relationship with the sun, Aridjis’s poems range from the humorous to the poignant, transcending the boundary between life and death as he explores his own past and Mexico’s cultural heritage.

A poet of worldwide renown, Aridjis has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and numerous awards, including the Global 500 Award from the United Nations Environment Program on behalf of the environmental association he founded, the Group of 100, in 1987, and the Prix Roger Caillois from France for poetry and fiction in 1997. President Emeritus of International PEN and former Ambassador to the Netherlands and Switzerland, Aridjis was until recently presently Mexico’s Ambassador to UNESCO. A prolific author, Aridjis published Poemas solares (Solar Poems) in 2005.

“Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light.” — Seamus Heaney

“In the poetry of Homero Ardjis there is the gaze, the pulse of the poet . . . the discontinuous time of practical and rational life and the continuity of desire and death; there is the poet’s personal truth.” — Octavio Paz

John Dolphin Allen discusses his new book, Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir, published by Synergetic Press

Anyone suffering from the Global Warming Blues will cherish this uplifting account of the most ambitious environmental experiment of our time: Biosphere 2, a miniature Earth under glass, the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology. John Allen’s memoir, Me and the Biospheres is a rich and complex narrative, filled with rollicking adventure, exceptional camaraderie and mind-bending science.

Covering three acres of Arizona desert, Biosphere 2 contained five biomes: a 900,000-gallon ocean with coral reef, a rainforest, a savannah, a desert, a farm and a micro-city, all housed within an air-tight, sealed glass and steel frame structure. Eight people lived inside for two years (1991-1993) setting world records in human life-support, monitoring their impact on the environment, while providing crucial data for future manned missions into outer space.

Almost as astonishing as the structure is the story of how it came to be. Back in 1969, Biosphere 2 was a mere seed in the luminous mind of writer, actor, philosopher, inventor, and scientist John Allen. He prepared for the manifestation of Biosphere 2 by assembling smaller projects: the creation of a ship to study ocean and river ecologies and cultures; a rainforest enrichment project; a theater group; a world-class art gallery and more. As awe-inspiring as the great cathedrals, Biosphere 2′s building and operation demanded the efforts of the most diverse team of scientists, engineers, artists and thinkers from around the world with whom John Allen worked closely for decades.

Me and the Biospheres is also an account of the singular life John Allen has led: his travels to Egypt, Vietnam, Nepal, Tibet and India, his meetings with people like Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. From building developments in Iran to adobe houses in New Mexico, from Harvard Business School to cafés in Tangiers, from board meetings in Fort Worth to mystical moments with Sufi sages, John Allen has impacted millions of people with manifest integrity. His humorous and Whitmanesque memoir is a tribute to the ingenuity and dauntlessness of the human mind. Me and the Biospheres is a passionate call to reawaken to the beauty of our peerless home, Biosphere 1, the Earth.

Synergetic Press was founded in 1969 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After 39 years of publishing, they are still fiercely independent and continue to follow their mission of advancing the most relevant and far-reaching work they can find in the fields of biosphere science, ethnobotany, and world cultures.

Ever since the civil rights movement, voices on the liberal left have advocated a retreat  color-conscious public policies such as affirmative action, and even from open discussion of racism as a key factor in the perpetuation of racial inequity in the United States. They have argued that the barriers faced by black and brown Americans are largely divorced from racism, and that these stem, instead, from economic factors such as deindustrialization, capital flight from the cities, spiraling healthcare costs and inadequate funding for education, jobs programs, and other programs of social uplift. From this starting point, they contend that “universal” programs intended to help the poor and working class are the best means for narrowing the racial inequalities with which the nation is still plagued.

In the first book to discuss the pitfalls of “colorblindness” in the Obama era, Tim Wise argues against colorblindness and for deeper color-consciousness in both public and private practice. We can only begin to move toward authentic social and economic equity through what he calls illuminated individualism—acknowledging the diverse identities that have shaped our perceptions and the role that race continues to play in the maintenance of disparities between whites and people of color in the United States today.

No one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.

Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

Elif Batuman was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She now lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco (near the radio tower). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Prize. She teaches literature at Stanford University.

The second installment of the City Lights Spotlight poetry series, Free Cell is the latest collection from Anselm Berrigan, one of the most significant American poets under 40. Consisting of two experimental suites—”Have a Good One” and “To Hell with Sleep”—connected by the central poem “Let Us Sample Protection Together,” Free Cell is Berrigan’s most ambitious work to date, a spiritual autobiography wrapped in an exploration of form. His work combines the freneticism of his New York environment with oblique humor, political angst, and a reflective, lyrical interrogation of his own subjectivity: “For my part it’s/ been an honor/ to be at someone’s/ service, though doing/ so has diminished/ my expiration date/ and my astral self-/ projection has already/ fled in bitter tears/ having used up even addiction.”

The first installment of our new Spotlight poetry series, Where Shadows Will selects from twenty years of innovative writing by Bay Area poet, translator, and visual artist Norma Cole. Beginning with her earliest collection, Mace Hill Remap (1988), and taking us up through her recent NATURAL LIGHT (2008), Where Shadows Will is a comprehensive overview of Cole’s melodic and experimental poetry, whose shadow-haunted landscapes embody a theory-informed exploration of the relationship between language, self, and world. By turns severe and exuberant, Where Shadows Will confirms Cole’s place as a major avant-garde poet and a leading voice among contemporary innovative women writers.

Renegade performer Penny Arcade makes a rare appearance to celebrate the release of Bad Reputation: Performances, Essays, Interviews, from Semiotext(e)

A runaway at thirteen, a reform-school graduate at sixteen, a performer in the legendary New York City Playhouse of the Ridiculous at seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susanna Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the New York art scene and an originator of what came to be called performance art. Arcade’s brand of high camp and street-smart, punk-rock cabaret showmanship has been winning over international audiences ever since.

Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, is Penny Arcade’s raucous, cutting-edge sex and censorship show, (which continues to be a commercial hit around the world), featuring the daily life of a receptionist in a brothel, the upbringing and rearing of a “faghag,” the evolution of the New York gay scene in the 1990s, and a participatory “audience dance break.” The funny and heart-rending title work, Bad Reputation, portrays a young teen runaway’s coming of age in a Catholic reform school (run by nuns who are former fashion models) and her subsequent life on the streets of 1960s New York. La Miseria, a rare depiction of working-class Italian-Americans from a woman’s point of view that portrays the clash between working-class morals and compassion during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, rounds out the trilogy.

Bad Reputation is the first book by and on Penny Arcade. The complete scripts are accompanied by a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus, a range of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade’s performances, an introduction by playwright Ken Bernard, and contributions by Sarah Schulman, Steve Zehentner, and Stephen Bottoms.

Jeffrey Haas discusses The Assassination Of Fred Hampton from Lawrence Hill Books

The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Jeffrey Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Fred Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Fred Hampton in a new light as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration in the fight against injustice.

praise for the book:

“A riveting account of the assassination, the plot behind it, the attempted cover-up, the denouement and the lessons that we should draw from this shocking tale of government iniquity.”  —Noam Chomsky, author and political activist

“A remarkable work.”  —Studs Terkel

“A true crime story and legal thriller, this powerful account puts together all the pieces, step by step, giving us the anatomy of a despicable episode in recent American history. The writing is clear and straightforward; the overall impact devastating.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Getting Personal

“This is an extremely important book–and a tale well told–for America to read if it wants to become what it says it has always been—the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  —Ramsey Clark, lawyer and former United States Attorney General

Jeffrey Haas is an attorney and cofounder of the People’s Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, community activists, and a large number of those opposed to the Vietnam War. He has handled cases involving prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican nationalists, protestors opposed to human rights violations in Central America, police torture, and the wrongfully accused.

Joel Schalit discusses Israel vs. Utopia a collection of essays from Akashic Books.

Isreal is a synonym for many things, the ancestral home of the Jewish people, the hell of the Palestinians; the realization of a centuries-old dream of freedom, and the heart of the War on Terror. No country inspires as much debate about its rights and wrongs, its legitimacy and illegitimacies, than Israel. Historically associated with Europe, such debate finally became common in the U.S. during the Bush era, as America deepened its involvement in the region, and Israel fought three wars.

In his new book, Isreal Vs. Utopia, Israeli American journalist Joel Schalit distinguishes between the Israel he knows, and the image of it that exists in the imagination of Americans. Israel is a state of mind, Schalit argues, as much as it is its own sovereign state. Exploring this tension, in America, in Israel, employing a combination of personal observation, political, and cultural commentary, Schalit defines the instability of Israel, as a metaphor, and America’s troubled love for it, as only an Israeli American would know.

Joel Schalit is a writer and editor based in Milan, Italy. The author of the critically-acclaimed Jerusalem Calling, and the editor of several collections including The Anti-Capitalism Reader, Schalit has edited some of America’s most influential independent magazines, including Punk Planet, Tikkun, and the legendary ’90s e-zine, Bad Subjects. His work has also appeared in AlterNet, the Forward, the Guardian and XLR8R. Schalit currently comments on Mideast politics for French global news broadcaster France 24, and is the culture editor of the New York Jewish periodical, Zeek. A member of the post-rock duo Elders of Zion, he is presently working on the band’s third album, Donkeys of the Earth.

This collection of mordant, poignant and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry and incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.”

-and-

Rebecca Brown, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and Robert Gluck celebrate the release of Life As We Show It: Writing On Film, edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn and published by City Lights.

Life As We Show It is a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right.

The first full biography of Thelonious Monk, written by noted historian, Robin  Kelley, with full access to the family’s archives and with dozens of interviews. Kelley has been working for years with Monk Institute founder Thelonious Monk Jr., who has granted Kelley access to rare historical documents for his biography. No other scholar has ever had such access and support from the Monk family. This promisses to become a classic reading of Monk to be referenced for years to come.

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003-2006, he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia Univeristy. From 1994-2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University as well the chairman of NYU’s history department from 2002-2003. One of the youngest tenured professors in a full academic discipline–at the age of 32–Kelley has spent most of his career exploring American and African-American history with a particular emphasis on African-American musical culture, including jazz and hip-hop. Kelley is also working on two other books: Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa and A World to Gain: A History of African Americans.

This podcast was recorded at City Lights Bookstore on October 29, 2009.