The electrifying body of poems in Tony Medina’s Death, With Occasional Smiling speaks with blood-soaked lips. The poet pulls us up from our knees, from the ashes of American history, imagination, and memory, so that we can listen to the clarions of what we must all face if we are ever to be free. Facing language and self at once, Medina’s intelligence, spirit, humor, and symphonic powers make language breathe in rhythms that resist bullets and blackface. These living poems are always-ever needed, as part of the threshing and reckoning we are burning down and rewriting in our time.
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths
In this sweet revelation of a book, Tony Medina writes; “Racism is an heirloom passed down through / Generations like a retrovirus.” It just keeps ticking, doesn’t it? Sometimes, it’s a time bomb, sometimes, it’s an alarm clock. Sometimes it burns, sometimes it sings. Sometimes, you can can’t bear what it has to say, sometimes you can’t hold in your laugh. Bullet, guitar, truthful mirror. Here we are, and there you go. Death, With Occasional Smiling is that kind of joint. Isn’t that called genius?
—Cornelius Eady
Tony Medina’s Death, With Occasional Smiling is a beautiful and important book. It is full of odes and elegies for young black men who’ve been slain by police, racist vigilantes or succumbed otherwise to a violent America. The ode to Stephen Clark is breathtaking and Medina documents forcefully our collective loss. At the center of this book is a war against black bodies, told with a precision, meter, and urgency to compose an elegant poetic and necessary song. Medina’s use of Black and Latino vernacular, culture, music and cadence woven with sorrow, humor, blood, bone, and defiance is exciting and masterful. It captures not only our woe but the gleaming brilliance of survival.
—Pamela Sneed
Tony Medina’s searing imagination, wild, satirical humor, and incomparable humanity emerge from these pages, a comic feast for the mind and the soul. His work is essential, a force that embodies the beauty and boldness of Neruda, the intellectual rigor of Ai, the wit and swagger of Ishmael Reed, Francisco X. Alarcón, and the clear vision and compassion of Sonia Sanchez. Reading this work, there will be times when you must pause, to brush away the tears before they dampen the page. Other times you will read aloud, just to hear the poet’s words take flight. ‘Caught in the throat of a rising sun,’ Medina’s poems pour over you and fill you alternately with sadness and joy, surprise, and a burst of laughter. Death, With Occasional Smiling is not a volume you read quickly. It is one that you ‘stretch to breathe,’ each line of every poem leading you back to yourself.
—Sheree Renée Thomas
Tony Medina is the author/editor of twenty-one books for adults and young readers, including I and I, Bob Marley (2009), The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems (2013). Medina has received numerous accolades including the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, a Langston Hughes Society Award, and the first African Voices Literary Award. His anthology, Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, was published by Jacar Press in 2016. His debut graphic novel, I Am Alfonso Jones, received numerous honors including The New York Public Library Best Books for Teens, and was a Barnes and Noble bestseller. His book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy received the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and an Arnold Adoff Poetry Award Special Recognition. Medina has read/performed his work all over the United States, as well as in Puerto Rico, Germany, France, Poland, the Bahamas, and the Netherlands. He is the first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University.
Price: $14.99—Includes shipping!
Paperback: 142 pages
Published: February 1, 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-945023-26-2
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.20 x 9 inches