Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive

With Ghetto Koans James Cagney has his ear to the ground and his eyes wide open. An ode to Oakland, this collection speaks to the craziness one gets used to, and does so with surgical precision. Like the patient in “Overheard in the Dr’s Office,” each poem will have you hungry as a grave then, suddenly, just as sated
—Nicole Sealey

In James Cagney’s Ghetto Koans, visceral stories draw a map that guides the reader on a treasure hunt through the iridescent underside of a skewed society. Cagney’s verses guide us through the littered streets of Oakland and beyond, where race and poverty dance a dark tango and “bullets are sperm fertilizing eggs in reverse.” Here, dialogues emerge from tongues that speak the truths of God and of Patron, a wedding takes place in a basement Church, and a child named “The Rewarder of Thankfulness” flips and splits on an empty stage. Alive and incanting with poetic forms received, invented, inverted, enumerated into lists, and chanted into urban spells, Ghetto Koans is a “flower (that) cuts through the bullshit between people”, snipped by “a ninja jingling with blades”—and true to its name, shows us the nature of reality, and leaves us feeling as though “wherever we were going, we had arrived already”.
—Maw Shein Win

James Cagney’s poems cut like scalpels through romanticism and self-deception as he reveals moments and characters many of us would turn away from. Yet they are bursting with the energy and culture that keep us moving. Cagney is an urban lyricist of earthquake magnitude
—Jewelle Gomez

I hesitate to call a book beautiful in these difficult times because beauty so often means the surrender of our consciousness, our need to confront the fuckery of the moment and the life we endure. James Cagney’s Ghetto Koans is perhaps the exception. It confronts the plight of human existence with unparalleled lyric intensity making for a reading experience like no other. Dare I say it? Fuck yeah I’ll say it. This is a beautiful work of art!
—Truong Tran

In his new collection Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, James Cagney shows us how an understanding of the modern koan requires a surrealist eye with a nod to a narcotic based frenzy just underneath the dissociation of everyday survival. Moments of grace and light punctuate deftly laid out hood settings. The poet chronicles a “gone” world that isn’t really gone, still preserved by an Oakland which functions as its own museum of humanity. These are the tales of the forgotten, quiet hustlers…not con artists…but real, breathing, blue collar hustlers whose lives have been shoehorned into the influence industry against their own dreams. Cagney illuminates these lives “into cleanliness beneath a flagellating sun.” In reinventing the koan he also reinvents the villanelle, letting the voices of Oakland, California, Texas and ultimately our future take over the poems inside, all while wrapped inside a loose formalism. In revolutionizing form and voice, Cagney, whose poetic gifts were already considerable, is showing us there is no roof on how high his voice can rise. We can only hope, for our sakes, that he continues this evolution, and that we are ready for it.
—Paul Corman-Roberts

Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is a visceral collection that resonates and vibrates the soul. James Cagney’s verses are like stones thrown into still water; they ripple through the reader’s soul, forcing us to confront the beauty and brutality of our shared humanity. In these poems, I see a heart that listens deeply to the unspoken, and in the debris of forgotten corners, discovers the light of endless worlds. This is not just a collection; it is a meditation on survival, an ode to the untold, and an invitation to find poetry in every crack of the city’s skin.
—Tshaka Campbell