”Gabb welcomes comrades with her brazen, well-informed, and emotionally cathartic poems: “to think about exploitation and say this/ this is what i think of and want to speak of/ walk with me.” - Publishers Weekly

“Powerful, elegant, lush, disorienting, philosophical, honest and cutting, full of life, clarity, energy, vulnerability and beauty. These are some of the terms that come to mind when I think of Vanessa Jimenez Gabb's vibrant new book. Here is a poetics of labor, history, brokenness, money, solidarity, ecology. Here is a book that thinks and loves deeply in order to survive the infinite collapse of the system.” - Daniel Borzutzky

“Anyone who has ever wondered what a Marxist love poem might look like need look no further than Vanessa Jiminez Gabb’s Basic Needs. With its focus on living—how it is done, in a country where workers have had to die for an eight-hour work day & in a world where “love is indeed a stranger to most people,” this stunning collection of poems manages to get at what is most necessary when trying, not just to survive, but find love that might one day lead to life outside of “this system.” & that love is unabashedly anti-capitalist, which makes me especially thankful for the “wayward light / in the poems” here.” = Wendy Trevino

The world is broken, poet Vanessa Jimenez Gabb knows, but she picks up the tiny pieces, shattered and scattered everywhere, with her loving hands. She is a poet who reports the devastating news, and pokes holes in the paper to give us light: there is sky on the street, there is hope in the hell, there is recognition in the murk. What a capacious heart, what visionary intelligence, what a devotion to the way love transforms at least as thoroughly as does destruction. I trust this wise, fearless poet’s sense of beauty and justice—I trust her words to take us deep into the future. We need her voice resounding there; we need her poetry witnessing and singing here, now. - Brenda Shaughnessy

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s amazing debut book, Images for Radical Politics makes anew the personal as political as well as the political as personal in language both familiar and surprising. Her poems pivot in sliding lines “like a diadem in your mouth” to continuously open gorgeous new futures for spoken song.- Lee Ann Brown

Reading Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Images for Radical Politics, I was reminded of this moment in Alejandro Zambra’s great novel, Ways of Going Home: “I remember thinking . . . that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn’t good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.” Gabb’s poetry traces (chases) the threads of many histories, whether familial, socio-economic, or historic, and means to find a source for their union. All disasters lead from or to money. The onward march of the dollar is part of Gabb’s syntactic flare-up in a deceptively quotidian landscape. In this book, all questions hold the violence of their truth. If she repeats, it is to subvert her repetition and crystallize new mantras (“we are and have been / we are and have / been working and working”). When she draws up images, much like Turner painting the colonial seas, their symbols convey a bloodier story of labor: “yesterday the morning / sky appeared to me / but it was the smoke / from a factory / where people had been / at work / hours already.” Images for Radical Politics is full of journey, writing with the same force of witness as Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Frank Lima. This is like no other book I’ve read. - Natalie Eilbert

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Images for Radical Politics is both a love song to and reorchestration of the America she’s inherited from Iroquois clan mothers, Timbaland beats, and her own careful observations of how the present sings to us from the past and future. Here is a Localist poet who has taken the time to not only name her own Brooklyn-based song, but also the songs of other working class New Yorkers. The ethnographic sketches that populate this collection remix the monotony of the daily grind, transforming it into a lush and lively music. Gabb’s debut provides a template for seeing through the world as it is to the world as it ought to be: more inventive, more surreal, and more transformative. Arriving at a moment in which she finds herself “Half in love / With the body / Not knowing how,” she continues thinking, looking, feeling, speaking. In doing so Gabb remasters a “me”—a fresh, refracted self—for this generation. - J. Scott Brownlee