Through strikingly sensitive poetry and song, Rohan DaCosta contemplates the change of a place through the eyes of a changing person. Haunting street photography shows us the romantic realism of a neighborhood in flux, a community in crisis. Fires rage and tent cities rise. Themes of pride, resilience, and refuge are carefully braided throughout. The Edge of Fruitvale is at once documentary, autobiography, and fictional narrative.

What People Are Saying

“The Edge of Fruitvale by Rohan DaCosta is a visual and poetic collection that documents ‘the Twomps’ with all its aching beauty and visceral pains. DaCosta’s prose and poetry deliver lines that rivet and engage: ‘Fruitvale is on fire / Like that car melted in half / Clothes spilling out the back on an exit wound.’ The black and white photos are a powerful and heartbreaking testament to the ever-shifting landscape of the neighborhood. ‘I just want you to remember me / Not just my name, but my energy / Until we meet again.’ This is a book you will remember.”

– Maw Shein Win, Poet Laureate of El Cerrito


”The Edge of Fruitvale is intimate and immediate. Poems, images, and short stories combine to create a window into Oakland at its current moment—a city on the brink of another major shift. DaCosta depicts characters in their fullness; they are both flawed and magnificent. This Oakland celebrates the strength of blackness and exists as a place punctured with continual change as narrators or DaCosta himself grope through the city searching for answers and more stable ground. In The Edge of Fruitvale, DaCosta's images create a place and his words give it its soul.”

– Samantha Reynolds, Root Division Gallery

"DaCosta is the artist I want to tell my story. Trust him with our common sayings, rambling self-portraits and the macro clues of our slow genocide. Trust him to document the hand-me-down plastic plates and the pain of having a stomach in America. He is the bard before a class war and our mother’s favorite son."

– Tongo Eisen-Martin, poet, activist

Publication Details

All of our books are printed locally in Oakland, CA. We strongly believe in supporting local publishers and local printers.

April 2018 • 9 x 7.5 • 60 pp. • Trade Paper

ISBN: 978-0-9994471-9-2

Cover photograph by Rohan DaCosta

Interior and cover design by Britta Fithian-Zurn

Author Details

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