An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems

An Apron Full of Beans is an African-American sequel to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, written in the voices and with the lyrics of the blues, the spiritual and the language of writers such as Langston Hughes and Margaret Walker. It grows out of the historical and personal reminiscences of these artists and their traditions. The setting is neither chronological nor historical as it moves backwards and forwards in the memory of the poet. The poems are thus autobiographical and biographical, expressed through popular art forms such as film noir, science fiction, blues, jazz and other aspects of American popular culture.

IN MR. SANDERS’ BARBERSHOP

For my mother, who got my first haircut at Mr. Sanders’
sit down tell us a story this Saturday morning
now the week’s almost done chew some
tobacco light a Camel take a deep smoke
in Mr. Sanders’ barber chair
(you almost own it payin’ and tippin’)
gettin’ that hair cut tha’s right put your behind
here in Mr. Sanders’ chair him with the gentle touch
(ask the women) he makes your nappy
hair lay down straight go through the comb
drift to the floor Mr. Sanders tell stories
of hard work this week done you out
those hands are rock hard grippin’ that broom
you with the red cap on so tired of standin’
at the train liftin’ bags or fine clothing
young man says Mr. Sanders “I know
your mamma and you workin’ so hard
sit down tell me your story”

Sam Cornish and Folks Like Me is to poetry what Ray Charles and the song “Georgia” is to music. Both men were constructed for their art forms.
— Maya Angelou

Sam Cornish has a direct and insistent commitment to statement understood by feeling, experience, history, memory. He is a sharpener and a sander and a honer. He makes solid articulations his heart shapes with his mind.
— Amiri Baraka

Behind the clean lyric line there stands a man who is harsh and honest in his blackness, gentle and perceptive in his humanity.
— Maxine Kumin

Sam Cornish operates as a whole person He hasn’t chopped himself down into categories. The fullness of spirit in his poems proves he has somehow managed to survive clear and sane through the everlasting maze of babble and brainwash-print blasting our sensibilities every moment everywhere.
— Clarence Major

Christopher Bursk confesses that until he was seventeen, he solaced himself by inventing an imaginary companion. The quiet triumph of this book is that he enlists the reader as such a secret sharer. In A Car Stops and a Door Opens, he takes us on a “road trip” that includes his troubled upbringing. On this journey, he explores relationships with honesty and empathy, while disarming us with his rueful, quirky wit: “No one else was willing to be Judas, so I agreed…” Bursk is America’s bard of adolescence.
— Philip Fried, editor Manhattan Review

October 2008
204 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-09-9