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Books published by Brown Turtle Press, Inc.
WATERING THE BELOVED DESERT |
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Namib. Desert. Namibia, the “desert country,” beloved home of the poet Mvula ya Nangolo, the author of this volume. The desert is also a powerful leitmotif for a region
that lacks a life-sustaining ingredient, namely rain, the rain of freedom from the shackles of colonialism and general occupation by foreign powers, first colonized by Germany, and then occupied by apartheid South Africa. The poet, ya Nangolo, takes full advantage of this seeming contradiction to create the expectation of rain to “water
the beloved desert.”—Daniel P. Kunene, author of A Seed Must Seem to Die, Emeritus
Professor & Former Chair, Department of African Languages and Literatures, University
of Wisconsin, Madison.
Mvula ya Nangolo’s collection is the fruit of several decades’ poetic refl ection. It is
combative, public verse, which wears its Namibian nationalism and Pan-African antiimperialism
on its sleeve. Despite the insistent patriotism, Watering the Beloved Desert intermittently shows a more intimate side to Mvula’s personae, especially in the last
section where the years of exile dissolve into the more complex struggles of the postindependence
period.—David Kerr, author of Tangled Tongues and Head, Department
of Media Studies, University of Botswana.
After reading Watering the Beloved Desert one wants to learn the frog dance and praise
the ancestors. In the heart of every exile dreams a poem. Often it is the poetry of land,
people and remembrance. Mvula ya Nangolo has given us a gift. Words for the thirsty.
We must drink and strengthen our bones, blood and flesh.—E. Ethelbert Miller, editor of Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st Century and Director of The
African American Resource Center, Howard University.
At times, Mvula ya Nangolo’s poetry is as staccato as raindrops on a hot tin roof. At
other times, it is as lightly seductive as the touch of a butterfly.—Jean Fischer, Namibian
journalist, in Flamingo, Windhoek, Namibia.
Book Title: Watering the Beloved Desert
Type: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-9821660-0-1
Published: November 2008
Price: $14.95 US
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PASSAGES - A Novel (Fiction) |
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Clare squeezed his arm...and increased the volume of her shout. The
words pulsed across his mind—unite and fight, unite and fight—
Andrew felt a kind of envy at the boys’ sense of security—a firm accepted
rite de passage, a well-defined place in the society...
Readers of this early work by Zgambo, with its extraordinary blend of astutely
captured detail, gentle humour, deep human sympathy, and penetrating social
analysis, will understand why the author has eventually emerged as one of the
towering figures on the literary, moral, scholarly and political landscape of Central and Southern Africa.— Adrian Roscoe, editor of The Columbia Guide to Central
African Literature in English Since 1945 and Associate Professor of English, Sultan
Qaboos University, Oman.
Book Title: Passages
Type: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-9821660-3-1
Published: December 2008
Price: $13.95 US
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THE SUN WHISPERS, WAIT: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS |
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Brown’s poems capture the delicate and subtle nuances of everyday life with precision, grace, and wisdom. His poetic voice gives new life to familiar scenes of joy, faith, doubt, and loss. Brown invites us into the lives of people
we all know and makes them interesting and provocative and new. His various speakers come alive in delightful lines
that spark new thoughts and reflections about daily life, family, and community. The Sun Whispers poems are fluid
and bold interpretations of Brown’s world. These poems will make anyone laugh, think, and reflect in ways they never
have before.—Chris Freeburg, Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Joseph Brown, SJ, a Jesuit priest hailing from East St. Louis, fashions the world of spirits—the numinous—afresh for our new age. As the author of Accidental Grace (1986), Brown, aka Luke, was sighted once before in that
compelling debut. The Sun Whispers, Wait reintroduces Brown in a fine, classical layout, brought to us by Frank
Chipasula and Brown Turtle Press, that perfectly matches Brown’s careful craftsmanship. This substantial collection
of mostly new, some previously seen, lyrics greets the reader with the delicate voices of ancestors, living and dead:
aging mothers, granddaddies and such—folks whose voices chiefly reach kindred souls held up by a world unseen.
From the quiet patience overheard in the voices he brings us in the opening section of the book, through the lighter,
but no less observant pieces of the middle sections, we recognize in Brown a descendant of Jean Toomer as in “It
was the dawn time,” from the poem “Spirit Gates” along with Brown’s naughty jottings on the unmystical visitations
of Jesus. One smiles while sensing something tragic in his sequence on Chrone, a mysterious man seeming to
have “fallen from the August sky” as in Robert Hayden’s poem, “For a Young Artist.” With the cosmopolitan air of
pieces like “When the Eagle Flies: St Louis,” together with his Civil Rights elegies, the sensibility of the Midwestern
poet is clearly evoked as Brown walks in and beside the path of Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks. - Gordon Thompson, Associate Professor of English, City College of the City University of New York.
 Interview with Fr. Joseph A. Brown
Book Title: The Sun Whispers, Wait: New and Collected Poems
Type: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-9821660-3-1
Published: April 2009
Price: $15.95 US
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THE ROCK AT THE CORNER OF MY HEART |
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Every heart has a special rock that anchors it to a particular place that remains
constant even as the individual wanders away from it. In The Rock At The Corner of
My Heart the heart is never far from the hearth and the original communal circle, to
which we always return with Kunene’s persona. Whenever we wander onto painful
territory, he humors us into buoyancy through comic ritual cleansing till we experience spring after a punishing winter. The best gift that he finally bestows upon us for
our patience is beauty in all its manifestations, particularly as it reveals itself in the
healing power of love. Kunene’s humor is balm upon wounds garnered over a lifetime
of living honestly and loving fully.—Frank M. Chipasula, Associate Professor, Africana Studies,
Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
The beautiful title image of this collection is given content in poems ranging from
tenderly vivid memories of a communal South African childhood to evocations
of a sophisticated American setting of chardonnay and cymbals; moving back to
mordantly witty comments on apartheid atrocities and then relocating in playfully
symbolic pieces on North American weather states. The rock remains in the heart’s
corner although the poet wanders far abroad. These poems live in the whole world
and see it with a clear eye, whether the particular sight be horrific or joyful. —Annie
Gagiano, author of Achebe; Head; Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa and
Professor of English, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Book Title: The Rock at the Corner of My Heart
Type: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-9821660-3-1
Published: June 2009
Price: $14.95 US
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TO WRECK THE WHIRLWIND WITH A GLANCE |
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Lina Zerón is a force of nature.
In all of her poetry what we hear is a woman fearlessly in charge of herself. A woman that speaks for many women.
Searching for love on her terms, for passion, for freedom of the spirit.
Mexico will not be Mexico without her voice.—Chiqui Vicioso, author of EVA/SION/ES and Ambassador for Women, Children and Adolescents at the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Lina Zerón’s poems are acquainted with lightning. In her hands we sense the luminous shapes
that mind and spirit know as wisdom made flesh. Defiant and wildly tender, the women who live
and love in her poems speak of ways by which their acts of freedom exceed boundaries. Hers is
poetry for the brave.—Marjorie Evasco, author of Dreamweavers: Selected Poems 1976-1986,
winner of National Book Awards from the Manila Critics’ Circle and Professor of Literature,
University Fellow, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines.
Book Title: To Wreck the Whirlwind with a Glance [Bilingual Spanish-English Edition]
Type: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-9821660-5-5
Published: August 2009
Price: $14.95 US
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FORTHCOMING TITLES...
POISON OF MY HATE [Novel]
Ken Daniels, an Afro-Guyanese young man, is a survivor of the February 1962 race riots in Guyana that claimed the lives of his dear mother and two sisters in a racially-motivated fire-bombing of their home in Windsor Forest. Left alone with his father, he nurses a burning hatred for all Indians, whom he blames for his kin’s murder. Now an exile on Leguan Island, Ken resolves to exact vengeance upon his enemies by adopting a strategem that yields pleasantly unexpected results...With a healthy dash of eroticism, Poison of My Hate still speaks to our time, three decades after its initial publication
Author: Beatrice Archer [Guyana]
ISBN-13: 978-0-9821660-2-4
Price: $14.95 US
ISLA [Bilingual Spanish-English Poetry]
Author: Juan Antillón [Costa Rica]
Winner of the “Ramón del Valle Inclán” Prize for Latin American Literature (1987) & the “Aquileo J. Echeverría” National Prize for Costa Rican Literature (1988).
MESSAGES LEFT BEHIND [Poetry]
Author: Lupenga Mphande [Malawi]
The long-awaited second volume of poems by one of Malawi's leading poets and writers, a world-renowned linguist who is currently an Associate Professor in the African and African American Studies Department at Ohio State University in Columbus.
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