Ballad of a Ghetto Poet is available at YOUR bookstore!

What if your only redemption, was the poetry that you wrote?

(PRWEB) December 30, 2003 --What do you do when you are young and gifted and the world has turned its back on you? That is the wrenching question at the heart of this extraordinary novel about a seventeen-year-old street kid whose only escape is through crime -- and the redemptive power of his poetry.

Ballad of a Ghetto Poet tells the savage and lyrical story of a teenager caught in the brutal cross-fire of poverty and violence that could send him on a collision course to the cellblock--or the grave.

Chico Grayson, is a teenager growing up on the tough streets in Richmond, Virginia, where poverty is a life sentence, and the only way out is behind the barrel of a gun. Raised on the harsh, brutal language of the streets, Chico hears the music of God in the poetry he writes. But God is noticeably absent when he falls in with a sly and dangerous criminal who draws Chico and his best friends Malcolm and Junnie into the city's violent underworld of crime. Torn between his allegiance to the boys in the 'hood and his unique gift that could be his ticket to a better life, Chico takes more and more risks, becoming a trigger boy in a series of drive-by shootings that sweeps him into the sights of a ruthless East Coast gang. Marked for execution, he soon becomes the unwitting pawn in a terrible murder that must now be avenged.

Filled with the rage and pathos of the streets, eloquent in its anguished portrait of life in the forgotten corners of the South, Ballad of a Ghetto Poet delivers a modern-day interpretation of West Side Story. This is a tragic and heroic tale of desperate hope and lost chances, and of what happens when redemption comes too late.
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