“This is an ear-experience beyond the realm of spoken word. This is a social document. This is a warning to the world. This is L.A. and a preview of the america of decades to come.” - Wanda Coleman, 1982

English as/a Second Language (talking package), released by the now defunct Freeway Records in 1983, is a comprehensive collection of Los Angeles poetry, music, and spoken word of the Reagan Era. In a sprawling 84 tracks, organized regionally from Soto to Sepulveda Boulevards, this double record houses a Cassavetes-esque ensemble of beats, hippies, poets, and punks, and includes the work of Wanda Coleman, Michael C. Ford, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Cooper, Exene Cervenka, and Henry Rollins, among others.

Solano Archives is proud to reissue English as/a Second Language as an intermedia anthology, publishing a selection of poems to serve as a reader to the record, which has been reissued and remastered. - Solano Archives

Digital Album and E-Book Download

Custom offset-printed box