Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize
2018 American Book Award Winner
2018 PEN Oakland Award Winner
Winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry
2018 NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year
Eisen-Martin's impeccable collection is a crucial document of this
time.--Publishers Weekly, starred review
This is truly revolutionary poetry. A vortex of images, observations,
inspired leaps and free associations spills forth from a choir living in
oppression and transience. Moments of political and spiritual
convergence, surrealism and blunt materiality, gangsterism and its husk,
revolution and perseverance, are captured in the music of metaphor and
pure intention.
Praise for Heaven Is All Goodbyes:
The tesseraic language of Tongo Eisen Martin's Heaven Is All Goodbyes
brings a new, shared articulation to the intricacies and
interconnections of grief and life, speech and site, state and
inhabitant, violence and landscape. Here, polyvocal assemblages gather
and revolt against our 'porcelain epoch / succeeding for the most part /
dying for the most part / married for the most part to its death.' This
is resistance as sound.--Claudia Rankine
I don't know that there is a living writer whose work loves Black people
as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin's work loves us. In Heaven Is All
Goodbyes, like all of Eisen-Martin's work, this Black love is not
clumsy, easy, sentimental or reliant on spectacle. That Black love lives
in the cracked history and ambient future of who we've been in dark, and
what's been done to us in the light. These poems somehow watch and
listen without intervening. And when they ask, they ask everything.
Heaven Is All Goodbyes makes me want to live, and write, with us
forever.--Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
What a wonderful feeling for life. If we are born--we will die. If we
love--we will be rejected. If we are rejected--we will leave. The
balance of these poems, one against another, gives us laughter, love and
hope. Heaven isn't Goodbye--its only the next stop on our heart's
journey."--Nikki Giovanni
Yet again Tongo Eisen-Martin employs his blade sharp intellect, his wry
and piercing wit and unflinching candor to make poems that matter. This
collection demands that the reader sees more than themselves--both on
the page and in the surrounding world. The poems beg to be read aloud,
to be pronounced as spells and incantations, as report backs from
communities both known and shrouded. Read this work. Then read it again.
Again. Again.--Chinaka Hodge*,* author of Dated Emcees
This striking new work from Tongo Eisen-Martin is a timely reminder of
Amiri Baraka's call for poems that are useful, poems that breathe like
wrestlers. At every turn, Heaven Is All Goodbyes demands that we
engage the systemic violence woven into our daily living right alongside
the persistent force that is black social life, the joy that everyday
people cultivate against unthinkable odds. And even though Eisen-Martin
grounds us, necessarily, in the material constraints of the modern
world, he doesn't leave us there. He calls us elsewhere. He brings us
with him into a robust, illuminating vision of the worlds that exist
outside and underneath the one that seeks to curtail our liberation,
contain our love. This is work that challenges as it lifts. These are
the unabashed abolitionist lyrics of a writer who knows that stakes are
high and so is the cost of conceding our most radical dreams. In a
moment marked by cynicism and disenchantment, Eisen-Martin remains a
believer: in the commons, in collective struggle, in our capacity to
flourish in the midst of what we were never meant to survive.--Joshua
Bennett, author of The Sobbing School
