Just/More

If you hear Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes singing through this tender howl of rage, it's because in 21st Century America Martin Wiley, the poet and paterfamilias, just wants to goof around with his kids, but there's a brutal war on Black bodies outside his door so he still has to wake up in the heavy morning not wanting "to know/how we died last night."

-Jeff Conant, father, and author of A Poetics of Resistance:

The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency

If "every word is a war" on the news, these poems are daisies in the guns pointed at us on the daily. Like a cousin to Baraka's suicidal preface in 1961, this long song meditates on how children fill the gaps in our broken hearts and light the way to our backstories.

-Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, 3rd Poet Laureate

of Philadelphia

A mixed-race child of the 80's, Martin Wiley grew up confronting and embracing a world that was as mixed and confused as he was; this collection grew from the pain of seeing his children facing the same things he did. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two kids.