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by Journey Johnson (Author), E. Nina Jay (Introduction by), Jaha Zainabu (Artist)
The anthropological lyricism of Astral Tribal: Poems & Epics, immerses one simultaneously in the avant staccato of free verse and the hypnotic tradition of storytelling passed down through tribal fires.
From minimalism to epic narrative, Author, Poet, Spoken Word Artist, Journey, is both brutally visceral and transcendentally centering in her accounting of the sociocultural subject matters and experiences exemplified in the realities of lives lived in the ethnographic margins of American society.
As a lens, Astral Tribal: Poems & Epics unflinchingly brings into focus, oft-times obscured, dark matters, such as suicide, depression, and death and the impact of an unjust criminal system of racism and classism on targeted ethnocultures. Daring further, Journey dips irreversibly into the darker still, hush topics of incest and patricide as well as the tragic abandonment of the infant daughter of a single mother struggling to survive through prostitution.
It is in no particular order that, almost mercifully, the reader is navigated to the soothing spaces between; where the indestructibility of Love embodies itself in gazes of lovers succumbed to the godliness of touch to the resuscitation of a mother's compassion in the midst of agony, and finally in the omniscient presence of ancestral empowerment as epitomized in the title epic, Astral Tribal.
Written over a decades-long sojourn as co-conspirator participant and awkward observer of the marginalized sub societies, the selected works in Astral Tribal: Poems & Epics is a portrait, however, marred, however piercing, of a people, beautiful, bleeding and eternal.
