The Trembling Tiber
$19.95
The Trembling Tiber, a black poet’s musing on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
– Greece’s Eyelands International Poetry Book Award Winner –
“…torrent of vibrating words engulfing the reader in their powerful rhythm and heartfelt truth.”
When as a visiting artist resident at the prestigious American Academy in Rome, Italy, poet Neal Hall, M.D., was stopped at gunpoint by a soldier of the Italian special forces. Hall’s offense: walking about black in an affluent white district. The soldier profiled him as an illegal African alien. By chance, the color-coded profiling and indictment fell on the Ides of March, the day Caesar was assassinated. This coincidence inspired Hall to take a deep dive into Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Thought the first of its kind, the hybrid poetic narratives emerging from this exploration interweave Shakespearean literary tools with those of Hall’s own poetic craft. The hybrid speaks in direct, new powerful ways to universal contemporary issues of freedom and equality. The poems provide a new prism through which to view today’s power constructs. They challenge the reader to recognize the coded and decoded socio-political-economic struggles of today’s marginalized people and to question – for whom liberty’s bell truly tolls.
1. Crown of Equitas
2. Protest March
3. Failing to See
4. Matriarchal Patriarch
5. Race Card
6. White
7. Neither Here nor There
8. Again and Again
9. Let The word Go Forth
10. Probable Cause
11. The Trembling Tiber
12. Clean From The Purpose