HIPOLOGY
Broadside Press, 1990
HIPology:[Horizons in Poetry] The Study of Attitudes; A Fresh Jive in the Wake of Post-modern Wreckage. You Dig? — Edited by Ron Allen and Stella L. Crews.
I WANT MY BODY BACK
Ridgeway Press, 1996
“A visceral happenstance”
Ron Allen touches the core of the meta-experience and at that core is ‘word sense’. Ron’s is the poetry of sensation. All of those sensations that defy containment by mere utterance…And those couched in the intricate rhythms of the ghetto diaspora. Yeah…Ron’s are the rhythms of the 12 street (pre-riot) bongo player. The nascent, primordial rhythms of the street/bush native who ogled his own core seeking meaning. — Faruq Z. Bey
“For all people who understand that RHYTHYM is the sacred principle of the universe.” — Ron Allen
WHAT COLOR IS AN ADDICT?
Broadside Press, 1996
The word is the process. The creative umbilical cord, the growth, language that defines identity. The deep complexity of meaning rhythm. The process of healing. The process, the journey… The word is the journey of purging. They take these words and remove cellular, mental blockage of past experience.They take the perception of the word (worlds-view) through the coldness of addiction and mount the challenge of re-humanizing themselves and the world. — Ron Allen, Writer-In-Residence, Harbor Light Center, Detroit 1996
NEON JAWBONE RIOT
Weightless Language Press, 2000
Ron Allen’s poetry lands on the ear like a sonic bomb.In a post-industrial wasteland of commodified identity and coercive conformity, Allen’s work re-opens the doors of spirit. While staying close to the hard edge of the street, these words conjure sky. They provoke the third eye and fly the shaman flight across the abyss of death. Any who dare to abandon the narrow prose of the commercial and lend their senses to such sounds will find new continents opening inside their bodies. — Jim Perkinson 9/21/00
THE UNBORN MUSE OF SHADOWS
Weightless Language Press, 2004
Shaqe and I call this work, ‘sketches of language, images and Buddhist reflection’. We approached this work as a text that would examine the abstract nature of life and be a process to articulate paradoxes, questions, contradictions and resolutions that appear in our lives. Shaqe with her deft ability and understanding of light and shadow, renders images that restructure our perceived reality. My contribution is the ongoing dialogue I have with my guiding Teacher at Still Point Buddhist Temple in Detroit…I believe that this work is meant to ‘be’ in the spiritual sense. — Ron Allen 2004
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
University of Texas Press, 2009
Published in 2009, Black Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora is the first collection to document the extensive participation of people of African descent in the international surrealist movement and its contemporary iterations. In the section of the anthology “Looking Ahead: Surrealism Today and Tomorrow,” editors Robin D. J. Kelly and Franklin Rosemont comment, “Anthony Joseph, a Trinidadian active in the Surrealist Group in London, Deusdedit de Morais, of the Surrealist Group Decollage in São Paulo, Gérard Janvier, from Haiti but currently living in Chicago, and Ron Allen, of Detroit and Los Angeles—a poet also noted for his dynamic plays—are some of the truest and livest “live wires” of today’s ongoing surrealist generation. The previously unpublished poem “Revelation” and “Conversation between Eye and Mouth” in the play Eye Mouth Graffiti Body Shop represent Ron Allen’s surrealist poetics in the anthology.
WHAT I SAY
The University of Alabama Press, 2015
What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship… The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots.
What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries. — Journal of Modern Literature 2015
