Tongo Eisen-Martin’s previous book, the critically acclaimed someone’s dead already (2015) was nominated for a California Book Award, and his poetry has been featured in Harper’s Magazine. He is also a movement worker and educator who has taught in detention centres from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and his curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black People, “We Charge Genocide Again!”, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout America. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Judges’ Citation
Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Heaven Is All Goodbyes moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice.
Selected poems
by Tongo Eisen-Martin
A lot of God can happen in three seconds
Not much heaven though
Here is a man before a fight: A leave-me-alone type of character
emerging from the penniless death
of a one-way-street fiction
I mean I’m going to make it
even if I have to drive backwards
All I have is chord changes and a thousand backhands
Driving a street like I’m choking it
Car full of nephews
There hasn’t been a son since November
And there hasn’t been a street I can’t choke to death
This city better back down
See this gun on the table
And something about staring until it all feels stable
Why wouldn’t I protect everyone
All my deaths sleep late
And I name them all
My son better be quick
My daughter better shoot first
Because we fold for no one
We fold for nothing
Ok, the first thing you’ll feel is a heat
This lady would tell me
Telling me about possession
Drink life neat is what I’d mostly hear
And most of the world leaves me alone
To breathe like a giant
To go to jail every once in a while
When the genocide kicks up in late May
When politicians have too easy a time:
I’m gassing backwards out of a one-way street
In honor of myself
And in honor of you (if you understand the nature of the world)
How long have I been
just like my father
One hell of a
resemblance says the
anxiety of five men
This is crossroads
Crossroads narrative
So much crossroad that
they got in the habit of
turning back
Turn back only to
find themselves
remembering me
But not my last words
A man before a fight
You will feel a heat
But there’s nothing to keep in mind
Nothing to remember
Really nothing to be
Just this moment
Then another
Then stare
Then it all becomes stable
Then the table legs go fuzzy
And Friday is an unfamiliar face peeking through the window
It’s cool to panic for a second
Composure is wasted on your worst enemies
People are marked on that sidewalk
You are the only thing life-sized
Everybody knows this
In a wire hanger empire
When the blood stops walking
This feeling isn’t father enough to be permission to fold
You better swing one more time
That father of yours
Rose from the grave and said, just give me five more minutes
Said, running water is a myth
It’s us who run up, down, and along side of this water
And people don’t rise from the grave
They are not laid down neither
It’s us who flip all round their body
So beware when the people around you look like they are about to jump
It might be your time
You’ll feel a heat
And when four walls demand to be four walls
And the earth outside mutes
Do not panic
Do not recreate the earth outside
Do not tell jokes to yourself
Do not talk disrespectfully to the four walls
Instead, unclench your fist and walk away
There might be heaven
if you understand the nature of the world
Copyright © 2017 by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven is All Goodbyes
Four Walls
- Just Keep Running: A Conversation with Tongo Eisen-Martin BOMB Magazine
- A Poet’s Principles San Francisco Examiner
- An Interview With Tongo Eisen-Martin Poetry Foundation
- ‘Breaking’ Presents: Tongo Eisen-Martin, a Poet With Movement-Building In His Bones Colorlines