By now, the poet Tongo-Eisen Martin needs little introduction in San Francisco. A native son, he’s made his unique and indelible mark in poetry, prison education and hip hop, and has gained huge respect in recent years for his public poetry recitations of work alluded to in, if not quite contained by, two remarkable books: Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015) and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2018).

Poet No Land “has surged onto the New York scene over the past couple of years, performing in duos, trios, or solo, mesmerizing audiences with her precise diction and incisive commentary.” She’s been deemed a “force to be reckoned with” by JazzRightNow.com, which made these assessments in a review of dates at La Mama and Spectrum. The January 2019 La Mama performance, in duo with violinist Joanna Mattrey, kicked off with No Land’s “Spiritual Auto-bio-geo-graphy,”  according to the review, “the most personal of all of her writings…a call for revolution of a certain kind, a complete remaking of all that we know.”

Writing about the April 2019 date at Spectrum, poet Anne Waldman, who was in attendance, was quoted by the JazzRightNow review describing the night. Said Waldman, “The show of April 8th at Spectrum over by the Navy Yards, curated by poet-performer, photographer, artist, No Land, was sheer delight. New raging talent . . . filling the eclectic and almost a mini-barn space, generous crowd, we traveled in the antithesis rhizome. Soaring sax by Devin Brahja Waldman with Roshni Samlal on steady tabla, an intrinsic duo where East meets wild mind West. Then, the debut of Notable Deaths, with radical poet Cait O’Kane’s powerful salient spoken word intelligent screed on the state of the land and Devin Brahja Waldman at controls pushing on beats.”