Many thanks to Red Room for choosing To the Break of Dawn as their “Book of the Day” for August 6th. It’s quite an honor and validates my decision to continue collecting my poems in chapbook form; partly to just get the poems out of my system, partly to get the attention of editors, but mostly to the share them among my personal network via gift economy.
With that said, I’ve already started to receive quite the bounty of artistic trade from the new chapbook. Here’s what I’ve gotten so far:
- Adolescents on the Edge, Jimmy Santiago Baca
- Bocas Palabras, Liliana Valenzuela
- Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas, MartÃn Espada
- Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
- Everything is Everything, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
- Find Your Own Voice: Poetry and Music (1982-2003), Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters with Special Guests
- Glow of Our Sweat, Francisco Aragón
- Heredities, J. Michael Martinez
- La Primera Voz Que OÃ, Brenda Nettles Riojas
- Mujer Frontera, Mujer Maliche, Liliana Valenzuela
- Stories from the Edge, Jimmy Santiago Baca
- “Summer Day” by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Art Card by MiPOesias
- The Poetry of Rice Fields, Liliana Valenzuela
- Wind Chimes, Gloria Amescua
I’m very grateful to all the folks who have shared these items from their libraries. It’s always a great treat to have a peer share his/her work with me. It’s also fun to see what folks are willing to swap when they either don’t have a book in print or I already have all their work. One of my favorite exchanges was with a non-writer who really wanted to support my work and was looking for a copy of Heaven Below. They dug through their whole backpack and emerged with a copy of John Legend’s Evolver. “Is this ok?” Hell yeah, I said, and happily traded with ’em.
The call is still out, anyone interested in trading something from your media library for a copy of one of my chapbooks— Holler at me!
