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What People are Saying About Snippets...

" A novel & insightful collection packed with both power and love. Rudy speaks volumes through syllables."

Maureen Geraghty, Teacher

"Rudy Bankston ponders how he survived.

The answer is in this slim, thoughtfully illustrated volume of Haikus, Snippets of Soul.

It’s in the words; the very creation, impact and lasting impression of the words. The perfect titles like Middle Finger, Bitter, Sigh, Furtive Pirouettes, Predators (…”cry us a river/we’ve been swimming with great whites/since the slave boats sailed”) and Saucy act as a springboard for what starts out timely and loud and strong and angry and revealing and it builds, it builds with a scaffolding of hope and love and angst and favor and sensuality, so that you have to take a breath…and you reach Conversations- parlay and banter between two poets, Rudy and Marca…”she said: maybe I’m simple/it’s a pejorative term/I prefer pared down” and you come to Musings with its bumper sticker candidates like the stellar Myopia, “it is difficult/to help someone that you don’t/want to understand”

And lest you forget that this is a writer who paid for sins he did not commit, there is the ending, called Cypher, an exchange between a black man, Rudy, and a white woman, Tina, about privilege and empathy, about color and pain. That section could be the framework for a course in school, the course about assumptions and race, microaggressions and healing. For whether there is hope, whether we move forward, whether we are humane; we are human, we should, God help us, be i Am We, the gospel of Rudy; for he, after all this, is inclusive and shares his path as an educator, as a member of this Tribe. So you go back a few pages, and you reread Tenet: “i believe in you/with all of my war-torn heart/i hold you sacred.”

You hit it out of the park Rudy, Snippets of Soul is universal magic."

Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, University of Wisconsin, Madison

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