(Eisen-Martin, Tongo) Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry book, someone’s dead already. He is also a movement worker and educator whose work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and his curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, “We Charge Genocide Again!” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. Heaven Is All Goodbyes: Pocket Poets No. 61 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) is Eisen-Martin’s much-awaited second collection. Moments of political and spiritual convergence, gangsterism and revolution, surrealism and blunt materiality are captured in the music of metaphor and pure intention. Nikki Giovanni writes, “The balance of these poems, one against another, gives us laughter, love and hope.”
