Low Rent Prophet

I’ve been waiting for Dani Gabriel’s second book of poetry for so many years. These are exactly the poems we need right now in late Trump, written in the June Jordanian tradition of precise and radiant truth to light our way. “Like fine night”, these are poems brimming with the everyday hustle for justice, joy and faith, in a working-class, queer, spirit filled psych survivor parenting voice. Gabriel’s words punch you right in the chest and the heart, and help you remember your breath and what you were put here to do. Like the author, “I don’t want to zip my boots grab my keys and head out into a world that hates me,” but these poems help me do it anyway, and make it to the protest or the next poem.
– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tonguebreaker, and Bodymap

Gabriel’s expertly crafted poems go down easy and create change from within. Flowing one to the next, with loving and devastating attention to detail, they reveal a world where sidewalks are holy and miracles are daily occurrences. While the fires of past activism and youth may be embers now, Dani’s singular voice singes the page. This book is a reminder that redemption is never out of reach, and that the god we search for was with us all along.
–Thea Hillman, author of Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word

Such beautiful, arresting truth. Maybe for someone, somewhere, a lifeline. – Ruth Forman

Dani Gabriel, Poeta, Activista, Molotov Mouth y Low Rent Prophet has the real talk for you in her new collection of poetry…
These are profound everyday poems that bear witness that “the worst things are done by good people on ordinary afternoons”…these poems are the details that weren’t suppose to be seen by anyone, the scars, the lingering pains that we are told to forget, forced to forget…
But they are also poems filled with a humble and genuine gratitude, a mil gracias for the simple and pure things in our vida that keep us present and keep us going
“it’s better than a lost heirloom/rescued from the heating grate,/better than the candy someone hid,/better than any lucky penny.” Dani’s words brings us back so that we feel, reconnect and remember, always remember the pain as well as the love.
Step into this collection for awhile wanderer. Sit and open this book in the sun at the BART station plaza or among the shade of the trees in Tilden Park and listen to this Low Rent Prophet’s words. Neta, Pura Neta. Amen.
– Josiah Luis