Ascension
giovanni singleton
Winner of the California Book Award

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Purchase print copies here, or write to counterpath@gmail.com.

Winner of the 81st Annual California Book Award for Poetry

In this diary of intentionality, the behearer and the beholder approach the world with an attitude of longing—for less: less sorrow, less suffering. Daily practice delivers the speaker to profound meditations on the nature of the self. These poems press against our deepest held questions: what is an I? Where are my borders? What or how am I “with”? “From whom—from what—do we hide?”

giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. A recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature, she frequently presents on writing, editing, and graphic design at schools and conferences, including the American Literature Association and Spelman College. She has been a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Her work has appeared on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and in Zen Monster, VOLT, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children, and I’ll Drown My Book: A Collection of Conceptual Writing. singleton has taught at Saint Mary’s College, Naropa University, and in museums and schools throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

Norman Fischer on giovanni singleton’s ASCSENSION: This little book of few words is immense in its silences, depths of ambiguity, range of feeling—dark, light, umber, copper, sienna—full of strange inward jottings (graphically adventurous) that echo and dance in a reader’s mind. Ascension’s quiet absences are fully, passionately, present—you can almost hear the music the title suggests, and the loss and wonder that goes with it.

Hermine Pinson reviews giovanni singleton’s ASCENSION (Counterpath 2012) in Poetry Flash

Poetry Society of America feature on giovanni singleton

Harriet blog interview with giovanni singleton

Ascension
giovanni singleton
$20; 6 x 8 1/4;
100 pgs.
October 2011
ISBN 978-1933996-26-4

Purchase print copies here, or write to counterpath@gmail.com.