Tia Chucha Press started twenty-five years ago in Chicago with the publication of Luis J. Rodriguez’s first book, Poems Across the Pavement. As founder/editor of the Press, Rodriguez has since published more than fifty poetry collections of quality crosscultural U.S. poets, as well as anthologies, chapbooks, and a CD. Tia Chucha Press is now a project of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural &amp; Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, which Rodriguez helped create in 2001 with his wife Trini. We are honored to announce the 25th Anniversary Edition of Poems Across the Pavement—close to twenty poems of an emerging poet that began a prolific writing career.

Poems across the Pavement

Literature & Fiction

Rodríguez, Luis J.

Poetry

Tia Chucha

"Marvin Tate's Schoolyard of Broken Dreams reaches out, punches, grabs, wrestles to the ground, rises and stomps in an original manner. His is a voice in contemporary poetry which dares to pry from beneath the concrete places over it by history and sing." --Sterling D. Plumpp, author of Blues Narrative

Schoolyard of Broken Dreams

Tate, Marvin

Rooted in the social activism of Vatican II, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, the poetry of John Sheehan is filled with keen observations of place, people and time, where steel mills and sand dunes intersect with schoolchildren, overhead remarks, blues and jazz, where pumpkins sit beneath TV sets blaring the evening news. Leaving Gary confronts issues of race and class, religion and landscape, memory and media, chronicling places which changed and places we wish would change.

Leaving Gary

Sheehan, John

Black male/female relationships, and women and their significant place in the life of poet Afaa M. Weaver, make up the terrain of Talisman. The poems in this collection attempt to understand and recover the love that was there and which will always remain in the spiritual sense, long after the doors have slammed shut.

Talisman

Weaver, Afaa M.

Plumpp's new poems show his extraordinary sense of the movement of speech and the poetic line, his dazzling metaphors, and his ability to turn language inside out and upside down by looking within the words and rhythms of what we commonly say without thinking. In his poetic versions of the blues, he brings something new into American poetry both technically and spiritually. Plumpp's blues narratives are a poetic form and a dialogue between poet and subject--they are unlike anything else in American poetry: a vital, passionate, haunting poetry meant to be read and spoken and sung.

Blues Narratives

Plumpp, Sterling D.

Poetry. African American Studies. "Reading theses poems, you'll think the stereo is on--their music is that sure and rich, exuberant and sorrowful in turns, full of a sexual sway. Terrance Hayes takes us through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to Coltrane and Miles Davis, but we always end up at the heart, where damage and tenderness mix, where lonliness becomes a blood tie. His generous vision finds beauty in our most flawed gestures"--Betsy Sholl, author of THE RED LINE and DON'T EXPLAIN. Terrance Hayes is a native of South Carolina. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and has published in a range of literary journals and anthologies. MUSCULAR MUSIC is his first book.

Muscular Music

Hayes, Terrance

Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex

Diane Glancy's eye and ear for the details of land and language make this poetry collection a powerful and important work about modern America. Glancy marries impressive wordplay with great emotional range, articulating the edge between two disparate cultures and the challenges of attempting to live in both. Relief of America is a major contribution to the growing body of millennial works guiding us toward the future by delving intimately into the starkest and most poetic aspects of our past.

The Relief of America

Glancy, Diane

Secret Asian Man is a hilarious and poignant look at the immigrant experience. Ang Tunay na Lalaki (Tagalog for "The Real Man") is the Filipino Marlboro Man, a macho and bare-chested endorser of gin. But when he finds himself in New York City and auditioning as a bit actor, disillusionment quickly sets in: he realizes he, an Asian man, will never be a sex symbol in America. Fortunately for him, adventure ensues.

Secret Asian Man

Carbo, Nick

Bum Town is Tony Fitzpatrick's allegorical tale of a journey through Chicago with the ghost of his father--revisiting the places that have changed, remembering the uncle who died as a boy trying to hop a freight during the Great Depressions, praising and dispraising a city of dreams and despair.

Bum Town

Fitzpatrick, Tony

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Books by Tia Chucha