Images for Radical Politics

Poetry. "I need a safe house everywhere I go. / The invasions are every day," writes Vanessa Jimenez Gabb in her dazzling debut collection of poetry, IMAGES FOR RADICAL POLITICS. Gabb's book begins with an economic update and moves through scenes of labor, liberty, danger, and the dull-gorgeous ache of a capitalist existence; an existence spent negotiating one's time and worth, one's civic role, one's money. "Come closer / Let me see your face / Tell me your name / What has happened to you / Today what was taken," we read with an intimacy that disarms. IMAGES FOR RADICAL POLITICS is an astonishing first collection of documented work and worry, of radiating radical concern. "The world is broken, poet Vanessa Jimenez Gabb knows, but she picks up the tiny pieces, shattered and scattered everywhere, with her loving hands. She is a poet who reports the devastating news, and pokes holes in the paper to give us light: there is sky on the street, there is hope in the hell, there is recognition in the murk. What a capacious heart, what visionary intelligence, what a devotion to the way love transforms at least as thoroughly as does destruction. I trust this wise, fearless poet's sense of beauty and justice--I trust her words to take us deep into the future. We need her voice resounding there; we need her poetry witnessing and singing here, now."--Brenda Shaughnessy "Vanessa Jimenez Gabb's IMAGES FOR RADICAL POLITICS is both a love song to and reorchestration of the America she's inherited from Iroquois clan mothers, Timbaland beats, and her own careful observations of how the present sings to us from the past and future. Here is a Localist poet who not only names her own Brooklyn- based song, but also the songs of other working class New Yorkers. The ethnographic sketches that populate this collection remix the monotony o