Pub Date: June. 21st, 2017
Format: Paperback
Pages: 76
Trim Size: 4.5″ x 6.25″
ISBN: 978–0–983547–84–6
Price: $10

In Waiting For A Spaceship J. Otis Powell!? pens a deep acknowledgement to both the pain of language and its potential for liberation. In these elegant and absorbing poems, Powell!? plays soloist to a backdrop of jazz rhythm, capable of moving from the elegiac to the celebratory in one shift of tone, expressing the haunted nature of American life: “Ghosts hitch rides on bodies/move inside souls.” The lyrical improvisation of his lines moves us simultaneously closer to moments of insight, haunting, and deliverance. “Ivory bones at the bottom of the Atlantic/Ghosts dance to water music nobody composed.” To read Waiting For A Spaceship is to find deep recognition with openness and ferocity. His poems describe how the moment of poetic expression arrives in daily life at soul level. This is a poetry of necessity.

Freedom ain’t ringing yet
Moon Glow and Honeysuckle hippies
Cut off hair put on business suits
Returned to mainstream
Reclaimed white privilege
I, still marginalized
Still bamboozled
Grow hair even longer
Wear suit jackets with
Faded blue jeans
And forgot how to pray
Displaced and sort of homeless
Resistance became my residence
Blues in genes
An inheritance of ill fate and disease
Blues in DNA go undetected

While working at The Loft Literary Center, J. Otis Powell!? was a founding producer of the award-winning Write on Radio. He has received a Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, Jerome Mid Career Artists Grants, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, as well as an Intermedia Arts’ Interdisciplinary McKnight Fellowship. In 2009, the MN Spoken Word Association awarded J. Otis Powell!? their Urban Griot Innovator Award and inducted him into the MN Spoken Word Association Hall of Fame. His publications include THEOLOGY (Traffic Street Press), My Tongue Has No Bone (Porter Publishing) and Pieces of Sky (Rain Taxi). He was co-editor of Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press). His writing was included in: Barefoot in the Mountains, Views from the Loft, and his work was featured in Bringing Gifts, Bringing News published by Downstairs Press.

PURCHASE: