End Homelessness

Photo by Sherry Rubel, not included in the book.

Here is the press release that went out today announcing that sales of my book, As an Alien in a Land of Promise will be helping the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness:

Hank Kalet’s As an Alien in a Land of Promise is a book-length mediation on homelessness and American capitalism. Interspersed with Sherry Rubel’s black-and-white photos, the hybrid work of poetry and journalism tells the stories of those living in a now-defunct homeless camp in central New Jersey, asking why our economic system turns people into refuse.

Based on a year of interviews and research in the former Tent City in Lakewood, Kalet tells the stories of people like Angelo, who lost his job in the crash of 2008, and the musician Michael. Interspersed with their voices – and those of “the pastor,” are writers like Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington, whose earlier research informs Kalet’s work.

Through the end of April, sales of the book will help benefit the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness: $5 from each sale will go to the organization. The organization, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, focuses on the eradication of homelessness in the Garden State by advocating, educating, organizing and litigating for emergency and permanent solutions to homelessness.

“We believe,” it writes on its website, “in a New Jersey where no one is forced to sleep outside and where every man, woman and child lives in safe, affordable housing.”

As an Alien in a Land of Promise focuses on the people who have been left to the elements, underscoring the need for organizations like the NJCEH.

The poet Eliot Katz, a former advocate for the homeless in New Brunswick, calls the As an Alien in a Land of Promise an “inventive mix of objectivist-influenced, journalistic poems and moving photographs” that “brings real, often-ignored human stories, statistics, and local geographies to life.”

B.J. Ward, author of Jackleg Opera, says Kalet “works in the poetic traditions of the inspired and observant narrator in Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers’ and, with his sense of lineation, Williams’ image-emphasis.”

Kalet is a journalist, essayist and poet, whose work appears regularly in NJ Spotlight and has been published by The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, Main Street Rag, Lips, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. He is the auther of Stealing Copper, Certainties and Uncertainties, and Suburban Pastoral.

The book is published by the independent Piscataway House Press.

For more, see asanalieninalandofpromise.wordpress.com/The book can be ordered at channel-surfing.blogspot.com/p/buy-books-by-hank-kalet.html, from Piscataway House, or Amazon. For press information, contact Hank Kalet at hankkalet@gmail.com. Press kit available upon request.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet