The voice in all of the poems in Hollerin from This Shack is immediate, unpredictable, insightful and, at times, startling.  It's a friendly voice that encourages a closer look, then gains your trust so it can show what is extraordinary in the ordinary concerns of everyday life.  Grace Ocasio expands the traditional landscape in these carefully constructed poems and all are enriched who travel it with her.

            —Kevin Pilkington

Grace Ocasio writes poems that are powerful, loaded with subtext, and full of social consciousness.  She takes on the role of poet-philosopher, giving a voice to many who don't have a voice in our society.  In these pages, you will "listen to the sun's heart stutter." You will see "tears the size of grapefruits," "poverty's breath," and "objects that glowed like cotton candy."  Her poems speak for a soul group, "When the only thing that lived beside me was the dark."

            —Diane Frank, author of Blackberries in the Dream House and Entering the Word Temple

I approach Grace Ocasio's elegant, original, angry poems in Hollerin from This Shack with a certain humility.  As a black woman, she writes of prejudice with a taut rage that alternately smolders and blazes, blossoms in poems that sing with startling images.  Yet these pieces inhabit a universe of shyness and innocence, a world of fierce honestly that places her as a sister to poet Everett Hoagland, a daughter to poet Gloria Oden.  She often writes as a child, or as a woman about to be hurt. Ocasio summons up real tensions between men and women, women most always seen as victims to be.  She writes with depth of the fear stemming from roots scarred with racism.  Grace Ocasio outlines personal situations, but they carry a universal charge.  In unique ways, she takes on themes that deal with the killers of Martin Luther King, her emotions about Lady Day, and her admiration for Mother Hale.  Her stark language enriches us.  In "Our Lady Day" Grace Ocasio writes: "If you take her voice out/ you will see tears the size of grapefruits whirling down from the sky."

            —Judy Katz-Levine 

Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Jonathan Monroe's Demosthenes’ Legacy. Writes Alice Fulton: "With Demosthenes’ Legacy, Jonathan Monroe creates a brilliantly elusive “poetics of asides,” a mutable linguistic field of planned accidents that evoke the uncontrollable suasions of speech." She continues:

Rhetoric is estranged as “language falters through its paces.” Syntax and grammar seem selfanimated: revelatory mechanisms shimmering with slippage and wit. Idioms are torqued by difference, platitudes skew toward the strange, conventions are revamped, the metrical foot rebooted. The erotics of perception shift as ground becomes figure, and refracted surfaces illuminate the possibilities: “Nothing severed, nothing gained.” Wayward strophes riff on Demosthenes, enacting their misgivings toward oratory eloquence and arriving at rougher, gnostic stutterings “where the jewel erupts, unfolds.” Words melt into cognates and homonyms as if purposefully mumbled, improved by a mouthful of pebbles. Demosthenes’ Legacy is more adroit for such impediments, more enthralling for its resistances. These poems are infinitely rereadable, rich with the subtle and seditious possibilities of language. 

This title will be available shortly from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher. Click here to order. Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions.

What others say about Demosthenes’ Legacy 

In Jonathan Monroe’s Demosthenes’ Legacy, the oracular orator nicknamed Demo travels a playful, intricate “path to unknowing.” Through a lifetime of rolling “word pebbles” in his mouth, as “language falters through its paces,” the quest for eloquence is transformed. In Demo’s virtual landscape, “net waves” of speech unravel and “audible suasions” conduct the reader through a “digital pluriverse” where “pronouns retain their right to grieve”. Beauty and knowledge emerge in language’s “predilection for uncertainty.” Experiencing language from within leads this Demo to a profound embrace of impermanence. 
         —Cecilia Vicuña

In this jeweled, aureate abecedary, Jonathan Monroe assembles an anachronistic account of Demosthenes’ “world beyond flesh.” What we find, delicious surprise, is a time porous with our time, aching for articulation. Clipped juxtapositions comprise each compact entry, vowels echo across the interiors, and sonic marvels are tapped to the dry-wall-stud of the prose with ringing nails. The legacy is our own. Monroe’s tensile prosody is masterful and the pleasures of the poems are exuberant. 
         —Forrest Gander

Is Demosthenes’ Legacy a translation of a real Demosthenes or his words or is it, as the impossibility of translation, fiction creating a character? Just as the word “kinesthesia” translates the sensation of movement (as if the word translates “muscle sense”), Jonathan Monroe’s fragments in Demosthenes’ Legacy are, as only immediate events, “Nobody’s narrative, no one’s dream.” The assembled fragments are Monroe’s comparison to modern media? Monroe’s playful text is a virtual “muscle sense” of the nature of event at all: “Webs released in matching threads.”
         —Leslie Scalapino

And so I asked myself: Is Deleuzean stuttering brought to bear on classicizing rhetoric? In any event, stuttering proves eloquent throughout Monroe’s writing, by providing a thoughtful way to utter a poetics. Demosthenes’ Legacy is the fine consequence of this deliberative process. 
         —Marjorie Welish