With snippets of news, scholarship, and a host of classical and experimental forms,
Jacobo the Turko explores the braided rivers of human kinship by tracing the misadventures of Jacobo Bitar, a young Ecuadorian of blended heritage and naïve dreams.
After a preface that teases regarding the plot and touches on the work’s fundamental themes
, Jacobo the Turko opens with a poster advertising summer jobs in Delaware, which Jacobo has pasted on the earthen wall of his mother’s home in the Otavalo village of Peguche, Ecuador. It sits next to “a pealing scheme of Levittown, USA: / houses like rectangular beads,” as he he describes it, “woven / in the tapestry of my dreams.” He contemplates his birth in this house, an event that occurred under the dim rays of a moon that hovered over Imbabura, a mountain sacred in the region. "Goodbye, house of Mother earth," he declares, "Hello, American Dream."
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Extended Synopsis
to Jacobo the Turko
Well, if the above novel [referring to
Midnight School, by Christian fiction writer Suzanne Fisher] approaches the need for a serious social reform in an upbeat and captivating faith-infused romance story, this one [
Jacobo] is nearly the opposite in style and vision. Bannowsky is a seriously deep poet and an even more serious radical activist; he has for years been in the trenches of working for progressive change in part through serious interfaith conversation and joint social action. His novel, if one can call it that, is a story told in poetry form. It is demanding, playful, at time infuriating, and fully fascinating.
More—scroll down.
High Definition Cover
Jacobo the Turko Recommended
by Hearts and Minds Bookstores's
Byron Borger
Delaware Chapter
I was the featured reader for
2nd Saturday Poets, 5:00 p.m., Saturday, February 9, 2019, at the Jackson Inn, 101 North DuPont Road, Wilmington, Delaware 19807 (302-652-9972).
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund was founded in 1991 in the USA to address the medical needs of Arab children in the Middle East.
Their Mission is to provide medical and humanitarian relief collectively and individually to Arab children throughout the Levant, regardless of their nationality, politics or religion.
Their Vision is to build the most effective, efficient, transparent and humanitarian relief organization in which every child in need gets the care and treatment they deserve, while improving the fundamental defects in Palestinian health services in the occupied territories and Lebanese refugee camps.
I Pereformed excerpts from Jacobo the Turko at the annual benefit dinner for the Delaware chapter of the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, April 13, 2019, 6 p.m., at the George Wilson Community Center in Newark, Delaware. See the Delaware
PCRF Facebook Page.
News and Events
(PRESS KIT)
The November 15, 2017, performance of Jacob the Turko excerps was a great success, and the poster is nice. See excerts from the excerpts in my video page or here.
