Regular readers of NJ Spotlight know that August is our time for kicking back and taking advantage of the lull in the news cycle. To tide you over during our summer hiatus, we’re posting excerpts from books by New Jersey authors or with Garden State hooks. We’ll be back tanned and ready on September 3.

In “Wild Invocations,” a book that encompasses the dead and the living, enemies and friends and family, poet Ysabel Y. González delivers passionate, challenging poems that are as a various as her home city of Newark.

Brick City
for Newark, New Jersey

Brick City babies came out their mothers shaped like stone,
the kind of red that takes root in skyscrapers,
kind of uncrumbled piece you think deserves the paint

And now a renaissance brims, constructed out of
gutted ground for the rich    But Brown & Black
always get to give grit, right?

Fight for recycled buildings that were once neglected
but we held strapped to our backs, right?
We love our cities over and over until they’re taken from us,

reassembled & called new
But our refusal to burn is what keeps us
& the thought

of how much smiling we’re going to do
when they find us blended into murals    Find us in the foundation,
find us in the city’s parks & statues, street signs

holding revolution Find us
in the stories they’re unable to raze

Author photograph courtesy of Get Fresh Books LLC.

Brick City from Wild Invocations by Ysabel Y. González. Copyright © 2019 by Ysabel Y. González. Reprinted by permission of Get Fresh Books LLC.

Purchase this book at Get Fresh Books LLC.