STRENGTH OF SOUL
by Naomi Raquel Enright
APR 2019 | PAPERBACK $16.99 | EBOOK $6.99
MEMOIR, SOCIAL SCIENCE | 166 pp. | 5” x 8”
ISBN: 978-1940939728 (pbk.) | ISBN: 978-1940939858 (ebk.) [COMING SOON]
RANSOM STREET
POEMS BY CLAIRE MILLIKIN
Introduction by Kathleen Ellis
APR 2019 | PAPERBACK $16.99 | EBOOK $6.99
POETRY | 152 pp. | 5” x 8”
ISBN: 978-1940939902 (pbk.) | ISBN: 978-1940939919 (ebk.) [COMING SOON]
2Leaf Press is pleased to announce the release of two books, STRENGTH OF SOUL by Naomi Raquel Enright and RANSOM STREET by Claire Millikin. Both of these books offer readers a chance to rethink old ideas, and consider new ways of how we see ourselves in the world.
STRENGTH OF SOUL is Enright’s first book. In it, she proposes tangible strategies and ideas on how to challenge systemic racism through naming and resisting the ideology of racial difference and of the white supremacy at its root. Throughout this volume, Enright shares reflections of her identity growing up as a bilingual, multiethnic individual, and as the mother of a son presumed to be white. She also advances ideas about how to confront societal notions of an inherent difference between the lived experiences of white people and everyone else, notions which result in the widely held belief that there is an inevitable “us” and “them.” In these poignant and deeply personal stories, Enright allows readers to imagine a society on a genuine path towards justice, healing, and true transformation. STRENGTH OF SOUL is a slim and thoughtful volume that urges readers to rethink the status quo, consider systemic change regarding institutionalized and internalized racism.
Claire Millikin is seasoned poet and author who has published five books with 2Leaf Press, with RANSOM STREET her third collection with the press. In RANSOM STREET Millikin continues her mediation on misplacement in American society through poetry. She specifically addresses the idea of ransom to explore legacies of violence in the southeastern United States. Millikin reconstructs moments of reckoning for these unsettled histories. A fee paid to release a prisoner, ransom can, Millikin shows us, initiate a sacrificial act that drives people apart, but also, when paid, can bring the homeless home. The poems in RANSOM STREET move through the question of release elliptically, exploring these abstract implications of ransom through a fictional street in a southeastern American town. The presence of inherited violence, cultural and familial, haunt the terrain of Ransom Street, as the poems move through a geography of ghosts, always seeking “ransom,” the sacrificial act that returns the self to wholeness.
Happy reading!
