Judith Tannenbaum

Spoon Jackson's book of poems -- Longer Ago -- is now available on lulu.com
Here's one of my favorite of Spoon's poems.

DARKENED ROOM

I sit in a darkened room
to hide
from nothing in particular.

I sit in a darkened room
to think
about nothing in particular.

I knock one devil on his ass,
ten more appear.

The angels, they want to stay
in the heavens, safe among the stars,
the lights of dusty immortality.

The devils swoop like hawks,
they swarm around the head
like summer flies.

I sit in bare-footed silence
chiseled in-between the two,
trying to keep symmetry.

Please watch the incredible book trailer Michel Wenzer has made for By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives.

New Village Press will publish By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, a two-person memoir Spoon Jackson and I are writing together. We will talk about prison, poetry, education, inequity, beauty, possibility, and what it means to be human. The process of our conversations -- in person at San Quentin, and in letters over the nineteen years since then -- is one Spoon calls diving, and both conversation and diving give shape to By Heart. You can read more about Spoon who is currently at CSP-Sac serving Life without Possibility of Parole.

New Village Press also published Arlene Goldbard's excellent New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. And here's another brand new New Village Press book I strongly recommend: Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World's Frontlines by William Cleveland.

Also, I have one more new book to recommend. Uncommon Community: One Congregation's Work with Prisoners documents and discusses three prison programs begun by a Unitarian congregation in Texas. The work is interesting, the perspective broad and deep.