Okapi Passion

Twenty-eight pages, and published by fellow poet Ishmael Reed, this slender volume features one of Ted’s collages on the cover.

There are two blurbs on the back cover:

“In the vast sky of poetry and the spoken word, Ted Joans’s star out-twinkles whole galaxies. Joans’s poems and performances combine his globetrotter savvy with gigantic insights, his musicality, his mischievous, even dangerous, sophistication; and good-old, get-down, freedom-hungry politics. Joans is the wandering grandfather of today’s post-Rap and Spoken Word poets. Like Langston Hughes’s, his spirit shimmers with a blues-and-jazz-seasoned love of life itself, real or surreal. Ted Joans is a 20th Century American-born treasure whose work is a pleasure to roam.”
— Al Young

“OKAPI PASSION establishes Ted Joans as the best of the Beat poets.”
— Cecil Brown, author of Coming Up Down Home