Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive

by James Cagney

Overview

The Japanese word ‘koan’ is a seemingly unanswerable riddle used by practitioners of Zen Buddhism to trigger spiritual enlightenment and understanding. Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is a vibrant, genre-busting collection of voices, observations and memories that trigger nostalgia of a lost time, lost neighborhood, lost city.

James Cagney masterfully weaves together monologues, documentary-style narratives, and keen observations, offering a profound glimpse into the lives and stories that shape this unique community and beyond. From direct door-to-door salesmen and flirtatious phlebotomists to rotary telephones and an appreciation of clotheslines, each poem serves as a window into the heart of the Bay Area, capturing the raw beauty, struggles, and curious triumphs of its people. Cagney’s words resonate with authenticity and depth, making this collection a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the rich tapestry of urban life.

Ghetto Koans is a journey through the soul of a community, told with unparalleled honesty and grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625571625
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Pages:	114
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

James Cagney is an African American poet currently living in Oakland, Ca. He authored two poetry collections: Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory and MARTIAN: The Saint of Loneliness. His books won the 2021 James Laughlin Award from Academy of American Poets and the 2019 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. His poems have appeared in Alta, Zyzzyva, Poetry Daily, Best American Poetry 2022, Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures, Powerful, Black Powerful: Black Voices Reimagine Revolution, Beat Not Beat, Civil Liberties United and Colossus: Home, among others.

Table of Contents

Preface {a closed library} Lemme Holla At You Untied Ultraviolet Solitary Dawn, Quarantine City Moment Of Silence U Get Used 2 The Craziest Shit Nigga Lover The Last Time I Pulled Over To Ask For Directions When They Rollback Prices On Yo Mama’s Soda Sandwich School Overheard In The Doctor’s Office Where U Tryna Go Gold Flip Flops & Sunflower Seeds Tina Turner’s Wig Gives Its Final Public Address Beautician’s Son Clothesline What Zero Sounds Like (After Watching Teenagers Attempt To Use A Rotary Phone) Three Variations Benjamin’s Witnesses Preface To A Photograph, Delano Ca 1976 Worm’s Easter Sunday Monologue Easter Weekend Miami Flirting Phlebotomists Marquis Paychecks and Balances Chris’ Wedding The Florist Bonfare: Fine Food Fast The Only Child Man-Talk Scars Ghost Homies Nobody Wants To Hear What God Has To Say About Love Bus Transfer The Boy In The ROTC Uniform Donate To The Crazy Fund A Blues From The Book Of Bob A Family Dinner In Berkeley Ideas of Home Housequake This Past Saturday At Farmer’s Market

Editorial Reviews

I hesitate to call a book beautiful in these difficult times because beauty so often means the surrender of our consciousness, our need to confront the fuckery of the moment and the life we endure. James Cagney’s Ghetto Koans is perhaps the exception. It confronts the plight of human existence with unparalleled lyric intensity making for a reading experience like no other. Dare I say it? Fuck yeah I’ll say it. This is a beautiful work of art! —Truong Tran, author of Book of the Other: Small in Comparison

In his new collection Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, James Cagney shows us how an understanding of the modern koan requires a surrealist eye with a nod to a narcotic based frenzy just underneath the dissociation of everyday survival. Moments of grace and light punctuate deftly laid out hood settings. The poet chronicles a “gone” world that isn’t really gone, still preserved by an Oakland which functions as its own museum of humanity. These are the tales of the forgotten, quiet hustlers…not con artists…but real, breathing, blue collar hustlers whose lives have been shoehorned into the influence industry against their own dreams. Cagney illuminates these lives “into cleanliness beneath a flagellating sun.” In reinventing the koan he also reinvents the villanelle, letting the voices of Oakland, California, Texas and ultimately our future take over the poems inside, all while wrapped inside a loose formalism. In revolutionizing form and voice, Cagney, whose poetic gifts were already considerable, is showing us there is no roof on how high his voice can rise. We can only hope, for our sakes, that he continues this evolution, and that we are ready for it. —Paul Corman-Roberts, author of Bone Moon Palace and 19th Street Station, Vol. 2

Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is a visceral collection that resonates and vibrates the soul. James Cagney’s verses are like stones thrown into still water; they ripple through the reader’s soul, forcing us to confront the beauty and brutality of our shared humanity. In these poems, I see a heart that listens deeply to the unspoken, and in the debris of forgotten corners, discovers the light of endless worlds. This is not just a collection; it is a meditation on survival, an ode to the untold, and an invitation to find poetry in every crack of the city’s skin. —Tshaka Campbell, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Emeritus

In James Cagney's Ghetto Koans, visceral stories draw a map that guides the reader on a treasure hunt through the iridescent underside of a skewed society. Cagney's verses guide us through the littered streets of Oakland and beyond, where race and poverty dance a dark tango and "bullets are sperm fertilizing eggs in reverse." Here, dialogues emerge from tongues that speak the truths of God and of Patron, a wedding takes place in a basement Church, and a child named "The Rewarder of Thankfulness" flips and splits on an empty stage. Alive and incanting with poetic forms received, invented, inverted, enumerated into lists, and chanted into urban spells, Ghetto Koans is a "flower (that) cuts through the bullshit between people", snipped by "a ninja jingling with blades"—and true to its name, shows us the nature of reality, and leaves us feeling as though "wherever we were going, we had arrived already". —Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House

James Cagney’s poems cut like scalpels through romanticism and self-deception as he reveals moments and characters many of us would turn away from. Yet they are bursting with the energy and culture that keep us moving. Cagney is an urban lyricist of earthquake magnitude. —Jewelle Gomez, author of Still Water

"With Ghetto Koans James Cagney has his ear to the ground and his eyes wide open. An ode to Oakland, this collection speaks to the craziness one gets used to, and does so with surgical precision. Like the patient in 'Overheard in the Dr’s Office,' each poem will have you hungry as a grave then, suddenly, just as sated." —Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure



 

From the Publisher