Heaven Is All Goodbyes: Pocket Poets No. 61 [Paperback]

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 forHeaven Is All Goodbyes:

The tesseraic language of Tongo Eisen Martin'sHeaven Is All Goodbyesbrings 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. InHeaven 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 Goodbyesmakes me want to live, and write, with us forever. —Kiese Laymon