2Leaf Press is happy to announce some of its 2020 titles. BORRACHO [Very Drunk] by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez and the debut of Dedria Humphries Barker’s MOTHER OF ORPHANS.
Borracho [Very Drunk]
Love Poems & Other Acts of Madness
[Poemas de amor y otros actos de locura]
by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
Translated by Carolina Fung Feng and Amneris Morales
Introduction by Susana Torruella Leval
BORROCHO [Very Drunk] by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, his second bilingual entry in English/Spanish reads as a poetic autobiography of a hopeless romantic. BORRACHO invites us to find the essence of a man’s character laid bare in the foibles of his desire and passionate pursuit of love. Spanning the poet’s fifty-year career, this volume of fifty love poems takes us on a journey through the poet’s winding paths of love and life. Beginning with poems dedicated to his mother and father, the cascading style of Meléndez’s verse strings together a series of vignettes within a flowing narrative of the poet’s life in love. Anyone who has navigated love and loss will find some affinity with these poems and a sense of companionship with the poet. This is Meléndez’ fifth book of poetry.
JESÚS PAPOLETO MELÉNDEZ is an award-winning New York-born Puerto Rican poet who is recognized as one of the founders of the Nuyorican Movement. He is also a playwright, teacher and activist. His work has been anthologized in numerous publications, and he is the author of six volumes of poetry, including PAPOLíTICO, Poems of a Political Persuasion (2018). An elder statesman of the New York poetry scene, Meléndez is a mentor for emerging poets and writers.
Mother of Orphans
The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow
by Dedria Humphries Barker
MOTHER OF ORPHANS, THE TRUE AND CURIOUS STORY OF IRISH ALICE, A COLORED MAN’S WIDOW is the debut book by Dedria Humphries Barker who examines a little-known piece of this country’s past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. This compelling true story centers around Alice, an Irish-American woman who defied rigid social structures to form a family with a black man in Ohio in 1899. Alice and her husband had three children together, but after his death in 1912, Alice mysteriously surrendered her children to an orphanage. One hundred years later, her great-grand daughter, Barker, went in search of the reasons behind this mysterious abandonment, hoping in the process to resolve aspects of her own conflicts with American racial segregation and conflict. This book is the fruit of Barker’s quest. In it, she turns to memoir, biography, historical research, and photographs to unearth the fascinating history of a multiracial community in the Ohio River Valley during the early twentieth century.
DEDRIA HUMPHRIES BARKER is a writer, journalist and teacher who lives in Michigan. Her essay, “The Girl with the Good Hair,” appeared in the anthology, The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2017). Her essays have been published by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, the Ohio and Michigan historical societies, and the National Trust for Historical Preservation. A Detroit native, she graduated from Wayne State University, and studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with James McPherson.
