AVOTCJA! With Every Step I Take

 With Every Step I Take by Avotcja

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

from "Poetry Feast," Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times 27 July, 2023.

Avotcja read and sang out brilliantly at the Hillside Club Al Young Memorial Tribute, Something About the Blues, and I got her Every Step at the Bay Area Book Festival.
I have to say it’s really the most MOVING and TRUTHFUL of all these collections save Julia’s, and the most personally resonant of the Bay and the United States people and an era who and which MUST be remembered, continued and preserved.

A Walt Whitman for our times, she rolls and thunders with Anansi tricksters, “Ebony, Tall, Fine;” street-smart and Biblical rhythms; bold, naked sacred sexuality, love, family and nature fed and uplifted and the liars, cheats, vampires, sexists, racists, silencers and narrow-minded money-grubbers and drug-addled fools revealed to the light and down to their hells.
Our Ancestors are crying & our children are dying!!!

Vital and vibrant are the colors, celebrations, personalities and life-and-death stories she portrays; Schefler’s simple and perfect drawings accompanying like visual berimbau and tambourines. Feel the beat, melody, body and sounds in her every word. These are all made to be READ OUT LOUD!
She made me want to shout, “TELL IT LIKE IT IS, WOMAN!” on just about every sorrowful, exuberant, furious, hot, hilarious, terrible and powerful page.

The rhythm of our innocence, the beauty of the melody that was us. Days when we cared enough to be a community & the Conga Drums were the heartbeat of the streets on our side of town…
Uncomfortably, we return to the uncomfortable, trying to remind the living they’re alive. Like stubborn lyrical phantoms we return. We! Like unstoppable rhythms, we’re on a “mission” to rekindle the faith in the part of us that has none…
We come back to drop the necessary flavor into the pot. We are the missing spice needed to rebuild our lives… It’s going to take all of us, each & every one of us & we have absolutely nothing to lose but our losses!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlA-k... Something About the Blues, Al Young Memorial Tribute, Hillside Club, Berkeley CA. 3 June, 2023

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