POETRY: My Old Man Was Always On the Lam by Tony Medina

I just got my poetry loving hands on MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM. I talked with Tony about his work as a writer and professor of English, at the recent Capital Book Festival in Maryland.

Reviews
My Old Man Was Always on the Lam contains powerful, moving, compassionate poems that spring out of the life of Harlem apartments and streets. It contains deeply felt, evocative poems of loss and mourning. In an era when too much work produced depends totally on the polished surface provided by the use of brilliant language. Tony Medina risks everything with his willingness to tear away the surface skin of relationships and life, to journey to that dark center where memorable poetry lives. My Old Man Was Always on the Lam is the work of a truly original and vibrant poet.

--Maria Mazziotti Gillan, author of the American Book Award-winning All That Lies Between Us


Demonstrating a combination of traits that gives him a voice like no one else, Tony Medina's poems are funny, intense, and tragic, and sometimes make you laugh until you cry. There's a terrible beauty in this book, a sparse and haunting music that stays with you. These poems are brave, and true, and well worth returning to again and again.

--Leslie Heywood, author of Pretty Good for a Girl and The Proving Grounds


Tony Medina infuses his signature wordplay with a heightened aesthetic urgency in these bare-boned, tender laments for his parents, extended family, and humanity or lack thereof. The old folks/In front of/My father's/Building are/ Buildings that/have been/Abandoned - these poems are sober brutal truths as pavement for a long ill-tempered sprint with death. And life. --Quraysh Ali Lansana, author of They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems


About the Author
Tony Medina was born in the South Bronx and raised in the Throgs Neck Housing Projects. He served in the United States Army and earned a BA in English at Baruch College, CUNY, on the GI Bill. He has taught at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus and Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. The author of several books for adults and children, his poetry, fiction and essays appear in over forty anthologies. Medina, whose most recent book is I and I, Bob Marley, earned a MA and PhD in English from Binghamton University, SUNY, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University.