Where a Nickel Costs a Dime captures the hip-hop rhythms and in-your-face intensity of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a downtown Manhattan club where the hottest young poets are finding their fame.
Willie Perdomo's poems, in the tradition of Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and Ntozake Shange, meet at the intersection of the street and the academy.
The world in these piercing and heartbreaking poems is Spanish Harlem, "where night turns to day without sleep," where "Puerto Rico stays on our minds when the fresh breeze of cafe con leche y pan con mantequilla comes through half-opened windows and under our doors," where "babies fall asleep to the bark of a German shepherd," where "Independence Day is celebrated everyday," where "the police come into your house without knocking. They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."
Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award and Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Mandorla, and African Voices. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a former recipient of the Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University, and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. He is a member of the VONA/Voices faculty and is currently an English Instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. Visit his website at www.willieperdomo.com