Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisThe dead are never far from the living in Patmos, the end is always nigh, and the cultural symptoms of denial and reconciliation, unresolved shame and loneliness, remain just beneath the surface: ""It is how, these many / years, we survived. In our rooms, alone, at the end of time."" In this book-length poetic sequence, Bruce Bond explores the psychology of endings as a living presence that haunts our spiritual, moral, and ecological imaginations, elevates its summons, and draws us to question its significance. The horrors and glories in the revelations of John of Patmos provide a lens into a wound, a crisis of values, a longing to heal a visionary brokenness that is fundamentally solitary and yet contemporary, written against a door that will not open.Trade ReviewBruce Bond’s Patmos is composed of quietly contained octets, bound together as a single elegantly clear-eyed and elegiac poem. Like the visions of John the Revelator (exiled to the island of Patmos), Bond’s lines conjure cinematic glimpses of end-times. They invoke a sublime mythic reckoning (“The sea will lift into the sky and take with it its mirror”), while evincing the intimately human moment (“the fly at the window, the bored child”). Patmos is wonderfully lucid and compelling, meditative, and vital, an astringently balanced music." —James Haug, author of Riverain

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Squatters' Gift is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. Like Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan and Tristan Tzara before him, Rybicki excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational poetry pointedly unapologetic and utterly unique. Karol Maliszewski observes that Rybicki has taken over from the Surrealists and the Dadaists: “the hero of these poems is language –– escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles." The opening lines of The Squatters’ Gift, is reminiscent of a sort of vagabond Jack Gladney from Don DeLillo’s acclaimed White Noise, wandering the supermarket aisles in a consumerist haze: “The supermarket / melts / like a chocolate bar: / a dendrite stack.” But the comparison is short-lived and far too simplistic. It is only tenable if the comforts of ritualized shopping are multi-lingual and multi-dimensional, Greek mythology intersecting with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory and time travel and psychedelic dumpster diving all rolled into one. It is this wanderlust and these sorts of imaginative leaps that animate much of The Squatters’ Gift and make it so incredible.Trade Review“the hero of these poems is language –– escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles. Some of these dazzles are of the highest quality, withstanding comparisons to the dazzles of Max Jacob or Rene Char.” ––Karol Maliszewski

Read more less

Book SynopsisGrennan's new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poems can also bring to vivid life a painting by Bonnard, a family walk, a childhood memory, a chance encounter, a man scything a field, or a brief probing of the work of Beckett. Paying attention is this poet's credo, coaxing his simple but layered, often interrogative language into revealing shapes. Grennan also chooses the repeated format of the poems themselves (justified right and left margins of different widths), aligning accident with design, choice with chance, to articulate his sense of the world as an energy poised dynamically between fact and form, between the time-anchored data of the world and the shaping rapture of art. These are poems that serve—through their intensely observed details and the rich, patient exactitudes of Grennan's language—to sharpen our own habits of attention, renewing our sense of the often unnoticed worlds around us.

Read more less

Book Synopsisapocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough/to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting us into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.Trade Review"The expansive and formally inventive second collection from Flame (Ordinary Cruelty) considers the cornerstones of romance—doubt, surrender, grief, resolution—through poems about hunger, exploration, and forbidden fruit." —Publishers Weekly

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrancesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.Trade Review"A moving and musical set of poetic works." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X’s life as credo.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAll animals struggle to survive. In John Barr's poems the success of the heron hunting, the albatross breeding, the inchworm spinning give proof of life. But for us that struggle includes the eternal presence of war. Does the fall of Rome, the Battle of Shiloh, the Normandy Landings––and today's wars—give proof of life or only of the struggle?

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe book is a detailed introduction to Post-Blackness as a literary aesthetic, tracing its emergence to the philosophical movement that defined itself in the visual arts towards the end of the twentieth century. Aiming to redefine African American identity in a postethnic era, it highlights the gaps in the metanarrative of history through a reformulation of visual images in the memory as signifiers with their related associations to historical trauma. Stating that the reformulation of identity needs a decentering of race, the study follows Rita Dove as she traces the path to this reformulation in her volumes of poetry to initiate a Hegelian progression towards a post-racial freedom to expand contours to redefine Blackness. Pointing out that poetry is perhaps the best vehicle to initiate this transition of the philosophy from the visual arts to the sphere of the literary, the book follows Dove’s reformulation of race as a spatio-temporal domain of existence, and language as lived space. Isolating signifiers to reformulate their associations with sites of historical trauma in the memory, Roy traces how Dove deconstructs history, myth, and music to arrive at a moment that is both post-racial and post-historical. This book can be useful to students of African American literature at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as to doctoral scholars working on race studies and contemporary African American literature.Trade ReviewTowards Post-Blackness is a valuable book that reinterprets the sensibility of a significant living Black American poet, Rita Dove, from a universal point of view. Any good poet must speak to readers everywhere; they cannot be pigeonholed to a particular place, race or identity as they transcend all identity barriers to speak to the human race. Lekha Roy argues this point in her book by approaching Dove’s poetry from the Hegelian view of the relationship between self and other. I recommend the book to scholars of American poetry, world literature and minority literature in South Asia and beyond. —Prof. Mohammad A. Quayum, Professor, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia Author of Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism (Twentieth Century American-Jewish Writers)Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a much-needed revisiting of Black aesthetics in the twenty-first century. I believe that this study on Post-Blackness and on Rita Dove as a Post-Black poet will be of great use to scholars of African-American literature and race studies. I would definitely recommend it as a valuable addition to the body of critical work available on the subject. —Dr. Ishrat Bashir, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Central University of Kashmir, Ganderbal, Kashmir Author of The Naked Truth and Other StoriesTowards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a major contribution to literary-cultural studies on the philosophy of race. In interpreting the poet’s creative and liberative journey towards self-knowledge in Hegelian terms, Roy reignites the ontological questions that permeate concepts of race, identity, and the role of language in defining ideas of the Self and the Other. This book bridges the gap between poetry and visual art to define Post-Blackness as a philosophy of life for a people straining to break away from the labels that define them. —Prof. Bijoy H. Boruah, Visiting Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Jammu, India Author of Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of MindTable of ContentsForeword – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Transcultural Space in The Yellow House on the Corner and Museum – History and Historicity in Thomas and Beulah and On the Bus with Rosa Parks – Deconstructing Myths in Grace Notes and Mother Love – Redefining Black Aesthetics in American Smooth and Sonata Mulattica – Jouissance: The Philosopher’s Playlist for the Apocalypse – Conclusion – Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe book is a detailed introduction to Post-Blackness as a literary aesthetic, tracing its emergence to the philosophical movement that defined itself in the visual arts towards the end of the twentieth century. Aiming to redefine African American identity in a postethnic era, it highlights the gaps in the metanarrative of history through a reformulation of visual images in the memory as signifiers with their related associations to historical trauma. Stating that the reformulation of identity needs a decentering of race, the study follows Rita Dove as she traces the path to this reformulation in her volumes of poetry to initiate a Hegelian progression towards a post-racial freedom to expand contours to redefine Blackness. Pointing out that poetry is perhaps the best vehicle to initiate this transition of the philosophy from the visual arts to the sphere of the literary, the book follows Dove’s reformulation of race as a spatio-temporal domain of existence, and language as lived space. Isolating signifiers to reformulate their associations with sites of historical trauma in the memory, Roy traces how Dove deconstructs history, myth, and music to arrive at a moment that is both post-racial and post-historical. This book can be useful to students of African American literature at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as to doctoral scholars working on race studies and contemporary African American literature.Trade ReviewTowards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a major contribution to literary-cultural studies on the philosophy of race. In interpreting the poet’s creative and liberative journey towards self-knowledge in Hegelian terms, Roy reignites the ontological questions that permeate concepts of race, identity, and the role of language in defining ideas of the Self and the Other. This book bridges the gap between poetry and visual art to define Post-Blackness as a philosophy of life for a people straining to break away from the labels that define them. —Prof. Bijoy H. Boruah, Visiting Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Jammu, India Author of Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of MindTowards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a much-needed revisiting of Black aesthetics in the twenty-first century. I believe that this study on Post-Blackness and on Rita Dove as a Post-Black poet will be of great use to scholars of African-American literature and race studies. I would definitely recommend it as a valuable addition to the body of critical work available on the subject. —Dr. Ishrat Bashir, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Central University of Kashmir, Ganderbal, Kashmir Author of The Naked Truth and Other StoriesTowards Post-Blackness is a valuable book that reinterprets the sensibility of a significant living Black American poet, Rita Dove, from a universal point of view. Any good poet must speak to readers everywhere; they cannot be pigeonholed to a particular place, race or identity as they transcend all identity barriers to speak to the human race. Lekha Roy argues this point in her book by approaching Dove’s poetry from the Hegelian view of the relationship between self and other. I recommend the book to scholars of American poetry, world literature and minority literature in South Asia and beyond. —Prof. Mohammad A. Quayum, Professor, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia Author of Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism (Twentieth Century American-Jewish Writers)Table of ContentsForeword – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Transcultural Space in The Yellow House on the Corner and Museum – History and Historicity in Thomas and Beulah and On the Bus with Rosa Parks – Deconstructing Myths in Grace Notes and Mother Love – Redefining Black Aesthetics in American Smooth and Sonata Mulattica – Jouissance: The Philosopher’s Playlist for the Apocalypse – Conclusion – Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.“All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of death unsettles all outcomes, these poems examine an expansion and fracturing of the self—into motherhood as well as childhood, into past selves and future unknowns. The child becomes parent, the parent becomes child, the child arrives but in doing so is lost. New loss haunts new life, and life becomes “one or two lives.” The door is more valuable than the prize behind it.With ambivalence as well as deep feeling, Metzger wonders how a single body can be expected to hold both immense joy and immense mourning, profound longing and creeping numbness, when one so often overtakes the other. She plunges into the darkness inside—of the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mind—and sends back “a searchlight across the underworld,” Eurydice in search of herself.Aching and contemplative, Lying In is an exquisite portrait of an in-between time—and of the person who emerges on the other side. “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?”Trade ReviewPraise for Lying In“In her second full-length collection, Metzger explores pregnancy, motherhood, grief, and bodily transformation. There’s a sparse formality to these poems, with their elegant imagery and philosophical musings, but they are also deeply human and grounded in the body. Blurring the boundaries between past and future, Metzger writes about the strangeness and wonder of creating new life and the contradictions inherent in being a new parent [. . .] This is a moving, vulnerable book and a welcome addition to the growing canon of complicated literature about motherhood.”—Laura Sackton, Buzzfeed News“These introspective lyrics consider the physical and psychic demands of motherhood and other forms of human relationship. Opening with a meditation on a difficult pregnancy—including a period of forced bed rest—the collection pushes back on the idea that gestation and birth are purely joyful experiences”—Poets & Writers“Elizabeth Metzger writes a taut, searing line. Compression isn’t the right word, because these are capacious poems, phrases that hold and open up worlds—of feeling, of experience, of memory mixed with a living moment. Efficient might be a more accurate description—or impeccable.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s“If the poems in Lying In have any wisdom to impart, it’s that our lives are transitional and contradictory, and that the act of creation depends on asking broad questions instead of providing specific answers.”—David Roderick, Poetry Northwest“Metzger reimagines bed rest as everything from quarantine to a queenly throne, her tones ranging from uncensored envy [. . .] With word-perfect precision, Metzger gives voice to postpartum paradoxes.”—Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation“This book is profound in the way it portrays love, loss, numbness and longing. … the overall arc of this amazing collection, ranging from poignance to the introspective, this body of work is a thoughtful offering that stays with the reader. I celebrate its unique relationship with language, its fine approach to storytelling, its ageless themes, cohesiveness, and how insightfully it delved into complex emotions and ideas, with sensitivity and depth. Lying In is one book to return to as often as one permits the longing for words that are devastatingly beautiful in their communication of experiences that leaves behind it, pools of light we never know how thirsty we are for.”—Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question“Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In is a book orbiting sacrifice, orbiting the way(s) one generation gives life then gives way to the next. She writes, ‘In wildfire ash / I teach our son the alphabet.’ A finger writes letters in the dust of dead trees—what is missing, what is gone, becomes language, literally becomes the shapes from which language is formed. Later, Metzger writes, ‘I brought a weather with me // but it was not expectable / that he would stay this long,’ and I tremble. Really, there is something of Dickinson’s elemental shudder in Metzger’s lyric; I feel it in that deep molten core of me only real art can touch. ‘What vision can be given? / What visible is true?’ Lying In is brilliant, no bullshit. Elizabeth Metzger has become one of my favorite living poets.”—Kaveh Akbar“Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In is a brave book about what enormous things you will do for those you love. Told from the perspective of bedrest, the book uncovers and examines the pain and possibility we all hold within us while lying still. Within this book, poetry lies itself on its own spacious bed, telling us all about the very strangeness of being and what great energy it takes to bother to exist at all. Metzger writes, ‘Child I bend around you / like a boat. / If you live / do not blame the wave.’ Within these lines, we are all the children of poetry, left there wondering if someone will save us. This book will save us.”—Dorothea Lasky“What an intimate, intense book of poems Elizabeth Metzger has written! Fueled by the honest combination of ardor and rage at the heart of motherhood, Lying In is full of arias, sung to the self and others, persistent and daring. These are occasioned by the actual confinement of the title (two difficult pregnancies), but that literal confinement mirrors a (potentially) universal condition—that of any life willing to grieve the real limits of our bewildering world, any reader willing to acknowledge the bewildering intensity of ‘the voluntary nature of staying alive.’ It is the mystery of the human will in continuing resistance that this book explores, as fragile as that sometimes seems. To do this, Metzger must be focused as a sniper, lying in wait to catch in language a truth that lies just past what can be said—and she is.”—Katie PetersonPraise for Bed “A bed of roses—or indeed, no bed of roses. Elizabeth Metzger’s poems act as both repositories and engines of mystery, of ‘secrets other secrets / have rubbed away,’ yet their mysteriousness never feels coy. There’s a difference between hiding information and asserting control over how it’s revealed. ‘I stayed off-center,’ she writes, and to me this has always seemed like one of the better places from which to view things, but hers is furthermore a poetry that recognizes, as Gertrude Stein put it, ‘there is no use in a center.’ Among Metzger’s many gifts is her ability to describe complicated positions simply, facing down the conundrums of language and perspective to devastating effect: ‘The children left me. / You say they came.’”—Mark Bibbins, Judge’s CitationPraise for The Spirit Papers“The Spirit Papers is a haunted book. Elizabeth Metzger’s striking poems, limber and torqued, conjure phantom presences and palpable absences, in which the dreamed-of imagines the dreamer: ‘You dream of me writing / your name on paper / adding in pencil a live.’ Metzger probes enigmas of kinship, often filial, and navigates a restless sense of estrangement, poignantly fixed on ‘the halo of what’s un-begun.’ The Spirit Papers, finally, and successfully, builds a world—a world built as much out of what’s found, as out of what resists being found.”—James Haug“‘A kettle whistles for nobody home. / And the wishes you never/and the others you will’ says what’s in the heart of The Spirit Papers. In these intimately naked poems love, and the anticipation of love’s inevitable losses, lets us see into the endless facets our imaginations contrive to if not console us, to keep us going. The book gives us the encouragement we get from feeling we are in this together and from what’s unbegun we’re given some hope, maybe to conjure a kinder us. Precision, quiet daring, a decision to not waste a word, assigns a ceremonial aspect to poems whose lines ask us to take with them the time it takes to let the spirit in.”—Dara Wier“Elizabeth Metzger’s intelligence and originality are spiritual, earthy, brave. Especially in poems addressing a very ill young friend, Metzger expresses a wild courage that seems instinctive. Her poems are braided with a love for this world that brings to mind Dickinson.”—Jean Valentine“There is often ravishing verbal abandon in these poems: ‘the halo of what’s un-begun about him.’ They join this to a formidable, discriminating narrative intelligence: ‘If he’s my first to go I will thank nobody for everything.’ Epigrams pierce, new-minted: ‘What light is to the eyeless / we are to the lonesome.’ What unifies these poems? They are carefully composed messages stuffed in a bottle thrown from a plague ship.”—Frank Bidart“I’ve rarely come across a first book as unconditional, as exquisite, as captivating as this one is.”—Lucie Brock-Briodo“These poems are unforgettable in their elegant reach past dissolution, their intimation that there is a better heaven to be made than a deity’s, that there is a dream and the dream is this exquisite yet hard-faceted grieving initiatory poetry, first-responding against death.”—Carol Muske-Dukes“This book is a book about heaven. It’s about the collection of human connections and love that make a heaven. In that case, The Spirit Papers is its own little immaculate heaven.”—PloughsharesTable of Contents1Lying In . 3Won Exit . 9First Wound Kept Open . 10We Are Often in Danger of Departing . 12You’ve Been on Earth So Long Already . 13Exaggerated Honey . 15Picture of the Floating World . 17Patient Mentality . 19Not My Child . 20The Witching Hour . 22Moses, New York . 252Welcome . 29The Whole Way . 30With Wayward Motion . 31Early Rising . 34Last of Kin . 36First Anniversary . 37Ultrasound . 39A Birth Interrupted On and Off by the World . 40Guest House . 41For My Mother Wanting Children . 42Inmate of Happiness . 43Mid-Supper . 45Godface . 49The Impossibility of Crows . 50Wrong Distance . 52The End That Followed . 54Mercy Later . 56Verisimilitude . 57Almost One . 58So I Finally Slept . 59The Flat Chapel . 61One More Day . 62Every Child Alone . 644As Long As They Want . 69The God Incentive . 70Sex Dream . 71Marriage . 72Roach . 73On a Clear Night . 75Mother Nothing . 76Daughter as Myself . 79What Are the Chances . 80Desire . 82Notes . 83Acknowledgments . 85

Read more less

Book SynopsisTelescopes aim to observe the light of the cosmos, but Christopher Brean Murray turns his powerful lens toward the strange darkness of human existence in Black Observatory, selected by Dana Levin as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. With speakers set adrift in mysterious settings—a motel in the middle of a white-sand desert, a house haunted by the ghost of a dead writer, an abandoned settlement high in the mountains, a city that might give way to riotous forest—Black Observatory upends the world we think we know. Here, an accident with a squirrel proves the least bizarre moment of a day that is ordinary in outline only. The future is revealed in a list of odd crimes-to-be. And in a field of grasses, a narrator loses himself in a past and present “human conflagration / of desire and doubt,” the “path to a field of unraveling.”Unraveling lies at the heart of these poems. Murray picks at the frayed edges of everyday life, spinning new threads and weaving an uncanny and at times unnerving tapestry in its place. He arranges and rearranges images until the mundane becomes distorted: a cloud “stretches and coils and becomes an intestine / embracing the anxious protagonist,” thoughts “leap from sagebrush / like jackrabbits into your high beams,” a hot black coffee tastes “like runoff from a glacier.” In the process, our world emerges in surprising, disquieting relief.Simultaneously comic and tragic, playful and deeply serious, Black Observatory is a singular debut collection, a portrait of reality in penumbra.Trade ReviewA New York Public Library 2023 Best Book for Adults“In this playful and haunting debut, Murray turns his gaze toward the ordinariness and expansiveness of human life…The observational and sympathetic power of these searching poems makes them hard to forget.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Black Observatory’s] strikingly surreal imagery fashions situations that are by turns ridiculous and terrifying. [. . .]This collection is edgy fun for fans of such surrealist poets as Edward Lear and Caroline Bird.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review “With these fantastical scenes, streams-of-consciousness, and absurdist associations, these poems encourage readers to process the complexity of emotion, experience, and the human condition. [Black Observatory showcases] Murray’s ability to seamlessly move into worlds where readers may find themselves unable to unravel the real from the imagined.”—The West Review “This collection contains revelations, warnings, reflections, and, of course, observations that make the reader feel a little less alone in uncertainty and less afraid while still being afraid.”—Eric Aldrich, FullStop“Just as myths work to explain why things work the way they do, Murray’s numinous work shows us that poems offer us the same power: a path to follow that becomes a cosmological roadmap for any to investigate the mysteries of human traditions, cultural traits, and religious or supernatural beliefs. Black Observatory is a tremendous reflection of the world and of us, in all our complexity.” —Mikal Wix, West Trade Review“Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory. Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dalí in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future’ involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep’ and ‘Kissing a foreigner in a time of war.’ There’s sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling—this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility: no one else sounds like Murray.”—Dana LevinTable of ContentsCONTENTS ONE A Welsh Scythe 3 Letter to Knut 5 Spartan Gavotte The Ghost Writer 8 Hallucinated Landscapes 10 Get Segovia 13 Endless Dictations 15 An Encounter 16 TWO Crimes of the Future 21 Merriweather 23 The White Sands Motel 25 A History of Clouds 28 The Squirrel That I Killed 30 The Haunted Coppice 31 My Time with Speece 33 Field 35 6 THREE The New American Painters 39 The Invisible Forest 41 Without Winston 43 W. S. Merwin 44 Abandoned Settlement 46 The Wayward Brother 49 Duke & Pam 51 Homecoming 52 FOUR Once, Long Ago, in a Poem 57 Salvaged Travelogue 58 Black Observatory 60 Meyer Lost an Eye 61 From a Letter 63 Remnant Showroom 65 Poem for X 69 Jaunt to Vermilion 70 Acknowledgments 71

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.The Winter Stranger audiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. Trade ReviewPraise for Winter Stranger“Holbert’s poems are emotionally generous. They blend accessible language with imagery that feels familiar yet beguilingly strange. “—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle“Winter Stranger uses spare language to portray a Washington countryside beset by hopelessness and addiction”—Library Journal, What to Read in 2023 “Succinct but uncommonly far-ranging, Winter Stranger crafts a pliable style from an amalgamation of sources [. . . ] Its stranger achievement is the fashioning (or warping) of a sense of time unique to American poetry. Holbert’s titles sketch a universe where everything happens far too often or not enough: symptoms recur like seasons (“Another Summer Withdrawal Poem”); necessary words never get said (“Unfinished Letter to Jakob”). Holbert’s narratives hinge on catastrophic change, but the word he pronounces most tragically is “stay”[. . .] few debut poets have such a clear-eyed sense of how much—or how little—their poems can do for them.”—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Blog, Poetry Foundation[Winter Stranger], is teeming beneath its plainspoken surface, like fish under lake ice. [. . .] I’m certain this is just the start of a long poetry career for Holbert. —Kristen Steenbeeke, Texas Monthly“In this beautiful book, poems of life are tempered by the shadow of mortality. Written in an exacting, minimalist style, with great silence, it records the tumult, the solemnity, and the spiritual survival of a young man.”—Henri Cole“A brutal, beautiful book about all the things that try to kill you in your youth—pills, friends, the trees, winter—and all the things that save you—pills, friends, the trees, winter.”—Hedgie Choi, co-translator of Hysteria“Engaging with the dead in epistolary forms, Jackson Holbert’s poems are born of the pain of traumas and addictions that, though now dissolved into memory, can ‘poison the aquifer / . . . miles down.’ What haunts me about this book are not its poisons, however, but its remedies, its rich influences out of Rilke’s night-fears and Paul Celan’s fugue music (‘We went to school we ate pink beef we drank’) and the stark, moon-pale wartime imagery of Georg Trakl, poets writing a hundred years ago but who are transubstantiated here into the language of 21st century parking lots, baseball fields, and emergency rooms. Holbert’s poetry is remarkably tempered for all its frenetic living, the lines crashing but landing acrobatically along the edges, never memorializing but advancing old relationships, the tone wizened and resilient, willing of heart. Even when the only light to lead us is poetry’s refracted and warped transcription—each poem shines through grief’s windows.”—David Keplinger, author of Ice“In the world that is Winter Stranger, oblivion is by turns muse and menace; life at once too brief and yet intolerably long—its excesses carved away by pills, guns, wildfires, grief; and violence often holds the keys to the only tenderness that hasn’t yet left town. Set in the semi-wilds of the Pacific Northwest, amid mountains too big to tear down and towns too small to hold their enormous losses, Holbert’s poems intoxicate with harsh yet intimate confidences, sharp syntax and tender letters to far-off friends, and vivid conundrums of life lived—and youth endured—far from any city. These are poems that dare to knock at death’s door and suffer him, for he is a character in their pages, to answer. They are poems that dare to conjure a reality, one caught between rapture and imperilment, in which ‘the law is full of dreams’ and regret is not just a note haunting the voice in your ear, but a pure and steadfast longing for the past, full of losses ‘weightless and bizarre,’ to change its impossible ways.”—Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of PhilomathTable of ContentsFor Jakob . 1I2003 . 4We Learned the Mountains by Heart . 5 The Christmas Poem . 6Letter from Nine Mile . 7Letter Sent and Subsequently Returned by the Mailman . 8These White Letters Look Nothing Like the Snow . 11For Taylor . 14The 26th Birthday Poem . 16 The Lamps . 17II The Book of JakobUnsent Letter to Jakob . 21Another Winter Poem . 22Jakob in the Basement . 25Another Summer Withdrawal Poem . 27 Waking in the City . 29Unfinished Letter to Jakob . 31Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It . 33 After Rilke . 35Poem . 36One Last Poem for Jakob . 37IIIWorld War I Poem . 41 World War I Poem . 43 Evil Nature . 45 January . 46Fragment . 47Burying the Dead High Up on the Mountain . 48Love Poem to the Terrible Doctors . 50 Poem Containing No Pills . 51After C.D. Wright . 52Dream Where the Men Are in My House, Eating My Food, and Stealing My Ideas . 53IVLandscape . 57The Water Poem . 58 Two Pastoral Poems . 61 The Uncle Poem . 63 Moth . 68 Notes . 69Acknowledgments . 71

Read more less

Book SynopsisShort Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love. In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy. “I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.” Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.”Trade ReviewPraise for Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red BroncoA New York Public Library 2023 Best Book for Adults“Iver’s fierce, sad debut collection offers a queer coming-of-age story and an elegy for the speaker’s beloved, a trans man from Mississippi who killed himself at 27. The book embraces the fluidity of language and gender alike.”—New York Times"A gripping debut . . . an elegiac coming of age story . . . . The most beautiful moments in this collection are of celebration, as when the two lovers, kept apart against their will, play the radio on boomboxes over a landline"—Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books“Iver’s poems acknowledge the limits of their own fantasizing, they adamantly support the vitality of trans reality…In this entanglement of transness and elegy, reality and fantasy intertwine to assess the transformative power of desire and its limits.”—Megan Milks, Poetry Foundation “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is one of the most powerful excavations of grief in recent memory, a genderqueer kaddish that veers from guilt (‘I have a body / and you don’t’) to despair to tenderness to searing anger... Iver’s poems will turn you inside out.”—Jonathan Miles, Garden and Gun“K. Iver’s debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is a book of living-through. Here the elegy is not embodied as form but as mode: the death of a loved one is not a subject but an experience that resists conclusion and shapes the perspective of all experiences thereafter.”— C.T. Salazar, RHINO Magazine “[Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco] is both elegiac and celebratory, a fierce love song about queer resilience, as well a mourning song about familial abuse and the violence inherent in the gender binary.”—Laura Sackton, Book Riot“The poems are truly in a league of their own; I’ve never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a gift—and a comfort, to those who seek it.”—Jami Padgett, Arkansas International“K. Iver's Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco is a gleaming counter-narrative of gender, place, and class. Framed by grief and longing, the poet's vivid and eclectic imagination sprawls through each poem, wrestling with mortality and ideas of transgression. The versatility of images, and the bright energy that pervades and suffuses this work, is a triumph.”—Tyehimba Jess“What happens to our present when we hold ourselves in the past? K. Iver’s debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, is a beautiful and heartbreaking answer. Reading these poems is like watching a dancer analyze their performance repeatedly on a big TV, pausing to circle mistakes with a red marker—‘This is where I go wrong’—until the marker coats the entirety of the screen. Grief colors everything—and still Iver fights to bring joy to the surface. You need to read this book; you’ve been waiting for it your whole life.”—Paige Lewis“Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is equal parts extended elegy and origin story; in these poems, celebration and lament collide to form a complicated portrait of queer grief and how we survive in the aftermath of loss. Iver refuses to offer up a simple and consumable trans narrative, instead making visible all the pain and joy and mess our lives contain. As much as this collection inhabits the fact of their beloved’s death, it also tries to write a future for both of them beyond it—their poetic imagination its own kind of mourning. In poem after poem, Iver insists on the tangibility and persistence of grief. ‘I am inconsolable,’ they write. ‘Every day a new definition / of inconsolable.’”—torrin a. greathouse“K. Iver’s debut poetry collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, brought me to my knees: in clumsy prayer, in imperfect grief, in an earnest and stumbling joy. In these stunning poems, Iver animates an imagined world of less pain, more softness, more ‘gold hair canopying,’ more ‘bodies shucked to bareness.’ Our grief as queers has always been collective and deep—and yet we are always finding new ways to hold one another. These poems are what I need and what holds me. This book is what I always needed. Iver’s work is a gift I’ve long begged for, and just now received.”—Kayleb Rae Candrilli“Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, is a tender examination of the intricacies of grief, love, gender, and the lasting impressions of deep human connection. This collection is artfully stitched together… through its depiction of the relationship between the speaker and their beloved.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review Table of ContentsContents Nostalgia XXXFor Missy Who Never Got His New Name XXXFamily of Origin Content Warning XXXTupelo, MS XXXBoombox Ode XXXA Medium Performs Your Visit XXXfifth position (intrusive thoughts at ballet camp) XXXM., XXXShort Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body XXXAnti Elegy XXX1987 XXXGospel for Missy During Our Three-Day Birthday Season XXXSleeping Beauty XXXChrist the Rural Queer XXXFairy Tale Prologue XXXFamily of Origin Rewrite XXXgod XXXMississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss— XXXSecond Position (Home Practice) XXXJane XXXa mother’s advice XXXBody Mark XXXWho Is This Grief For? XXX[Boy] Meets Girl 40 XXXFantasy with No Secrets XXXShort Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco XXXFantasy in Which There Was Nothing for Us to Survive XXXApril 25, 2020 XXX[Boy] Meets Them XXXMy Ghost Asks What the 2020s Are Like XXXBecause You Can’t XXX

Read more less

Book SynopsisAward-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection. Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik wrote to his parents beginning at age eight. Both elegy and praise song, there is joy and sorrow, healing, and a mother’s triumphant heart that rises and blooms again. Mama Phife Represents has been awarded the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry by The Publishing TriangleTrade Review“A teacher begets a teacher and a poet begets a poet. This book is the embodiment of pure love, grace and hope. Herein, Mama Phife aka Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has given us a gift about her greatest gift, her son Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor. Malik was a great storyteller. To say he got it from his mama is an understatement. He was a treasure to me and Cheryl’s writings and memoirs help to comfort the place that misses him greatly. I thank her for this book and for still teaching us... like her mother before her.” —Ali Shaheed Muhammad, A Tribe Called Quest “I am eternally hopeful that more people in the world come to terms with understanding that for anyone to share an experience of grief is a true generosity. With Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor allows a reader to bask in the generosity. The sharing of loss and grief is the building of a bridge that others who have experienced that specific loss can cross. This is a book about losing a child, yes. But beyond that, it is a book of tactile emotions, and a singularly musical writing, which Boyce-Taylor has always done so well. Above all, Mama Phife Represents shows anyone who has lost someone how to make the most of memory, and the most of their own survival.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest “‘All around are unhinged bones / wailing at the lip of sea.’ And: ‘I’ve stitched your breath / to my throat.’ Such lines carry the loss of the writer's beautiful son out of which emerges this book of love, of joy, of grief, but also of plenty. Through poems, letters, photographs, and other communications, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has gathered an exquisite record of this Great love between mother and son, artist and artist. Quietly I say to you here: It is like nothing else I have quite read. An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria “Malik Phife Dawg Taylor represents everything that's beautiful about Hip-Hop. I had the honor of meeting his mother Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, the poet, long before I met him. She inspired me to become a better artist. When I became a professional artist, Malik was one of my biggest supporters. Without them, I don't know if I would be the artist I am today. This book is like a piece of me.” —Talib Kweli, Hip-Hop Artist “Mama Phife Represents is an intimate and heartbreaking tribute to Boyce-Taylor’s son, Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor. Not only does Boyce-Taylor deftly humanize the hip-hop superhero, but she also logs every fragile emotion in both eulogy and celebration: so much so that ‘she will travel to Anguilla/ beg Yemaya to bring him back.’ The light that the poet finds on this journey is nearly unfathomable, but always redemptive. This collection is a monument, and I am grateful for it.” —Michael Cirelli, CEO of Urban Word National Youth Poet Laureate Program “Mama Phife Represents is at once a memoir and a living archive of one man's extraordinary life and his mother's love and pain in the face of his loss. At a time in the United States when so many black mothers are losing their black children — through illness and violence — this book stands as a testament to the deep, ground-shifting impact of that loss across generations. Honest, Healing, Timely.” —Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, poet, novelist, and scholar “These poems shred and rebuild. They keen and holler, they are not ashamed. Not afraid. They drill hard to the marrow of suffering and rise up alive. Singing. A mourning song, yes, but a song. It is sometimes “the crude voice of earth’s sorrow,” but it also, and always, unmistakably and unshakably Cheryl’s. The poet, the mother, the wife, the lover, singing into her own, and by extension the world’s survival and renewal and re-blooming. If we are lucky, someday someone will say of each of us when we are lost, ‘all the stars have followed after you.’” —Marty McConnell

Read more less

Book SynopsisMama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body’s lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.Trade Review“I am eternally hopeful that more people in the world come to terms with understanding that for anyone to share an experience of grief is a true generosity. With Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor allows a reader to bask in the generosity. The sharing of loss and grief is the building of a bridge that others who have experienced that specific loss can cross. This is a book about losing a child, yes. But beyond that, it is a book of tactile emotions, and a singularly musical writing, which Boyce-Taylor has always done so well. Above all, Mama Phife Represents shows anyone who has lost someone how to make the most of memory, and the most of their own survival.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest “‘All around are unhinged bones / wailing at the lip of sea.’ And: ‘I’ve stitched your breath / to my throat.’ Such lines carry the loss of the writer's beautiful son out of which emerges this book of love, of joy, of grief, but also of plenty. Through poems, letters, photographs, and other communications, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has gathered an exquisite record of this Great love between mother and son, artist and artist. Quietly I say to you here: It is like nothing else I have quite read. An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria “Mama Phife Represents is an intimate and heartbreaking tribute to Boyce-Taylor’s son, Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor. Not only does Boyce-Taylor deftly humanize the hip-hop superhero, but she also logs every fragile emotion in both eulogy and celebration: so much so that ‘she will travel to Anguilla/ beg Yemaya to bring him back.’ The light that the poet finds on this journey is nearly unfathomable, but always redemptive. This collection is a monument, and I am grateful for it.” —Michael Cirelli, CEO of Urban Word National Youth Poet Laureate Program “Mama Phife Represents is at once a memoir and a living archive of one man's extraordinary life and his mother's love and pain in the face of his loss. At a time in the United States when so many black mothers are losing their black children — through illness and violence — this book stands as a testament to the deep, ground-shifting impact of that loss across generations. Honest, Healing, Timely.” —Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, poet, novelist, and scholar

Read more less

Book SynopsisThere are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency. This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTim Stafford’s work lives in the buffer zone between Chicago and the American Dream — far from the suburbs with white picket fences and country clubs but still too far to be of the city proper. Like a carefully curated mixtape, Stafford’s work navigates the side streets and highways in between, linking those worlds in an effort to create his own. Trade Review “Blunt, hilarious, and heartfelt, Tim Stafford's debut collection is a knock-out—a sweet, sober, and hard-won lesson on staying authentic.”—Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Dr. Mutter’s Marvels“This collection riots with narrative and coming of age in a laugh and music-filled tour of Chicago.”—Peter Kahn, author of Little Kings“Tim Stafford’s poems hit you like a punch in the arm from a best friend, simultaneously violent and funny.”—Joaquín Zihuatanejo, author of Arsonist“While I was never a young punk growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, reading Tim Stafford’s Patron Saint brought many smiles to my face, returning me to the sweetness of the open-heartedness of it all, of what the world can offer us, small as we may have been.”—Anis Mojgani, Oregon Poet Laureate

Read more less

Book SynopsisWINNER of the JUDITH A. MARKOWITZ AWARD 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER LONGLISTED for the HEARTLAND BOOKSELLERS AWARD In this debut collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.Trade Review“In the tradition of Natasha Trethewey and Danez Smith, Phillips sees a through line from slavery to racism past and present. HULL is their bold indictment of prejudice.”—Rebecca Foster, Foreword “This complex and historically layered collection takes some work on the part of white cis readers; but it’s just the work we should be doing.”—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine “In this debut collection, Phillips’s poems breathe a story as long as time, in which history holds to its pattern of the same crimes committed again and again against the Black body...”—Laura Eve Engel, Poets.org “Hull demonstrates Phillips’s ability to expand the lyric to its breaking point, which makes this book a promising debut.”—Tyrone Williams, Rain Taxi “Hull is a reminder of our collective endeavor to swim murky waters, shark-ridden seas, just to feel our kin, to kiss our loves, to remember our tongues, to make a life.”—Deria M., The Bind “Phillips’ work often deals with that intimacy and the greater question of being a vulnerable person in the world. Their poems confront the history and the present together in the same room, while discussing the intricacies of being a black queer person in a post-colonial world.”—Dani Janae, Autostraddle "Hull is not a balm or teaching tool, rather it’s a territory that Phillips establishes and then asks us to look upon."—Laura Jeanne K, Entropy “’Let’s deflate something that we can all agree is / monstrous, and take its air inside us,’” writes Xandria Phillips in Hull. A decolonization of space and self is made physical in this. Stunning, textured, and ambitious collection of poems. This work positions snapshots of contemporary black, queer selfhood against an embodied historical backdrop in order to trace the tolls and infringements of white dominant structures and embedded historical violence upon the body. When I read it, I am reminded of the ways in which language can be repurposed as an amplification device against narratives that seek to erase, bury, and diminish. These poems articulate how living, touching, noticing, speaking, and remembering are necessary and subversive acts.”—Claudia Rankine "With its queerness and excavation of history, Xandria Phillips’ HULL lives somewhere between Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead and Rachel McKibbens's Blud; the result is bodily, razor-sharp, and wholly unforgettable. I didn't know how badly I needed these poems until they were unfurling in my hands, devastating and brilliant.” —Carmen Maria Machado “From the first poem, in HULL, I was immediately hooked. At least three ways to read it: vertically both top to bottom and bottom to top, horizontally, and each one better. This much excitement and promise comes just from experiencing this single poem that is a collection of poetry all by itself. I can’t imagine that Xandria has left anything to chance. Everything planned—brilliantly executed. Everything precise. Xandria Phillips is no ordinary architect.” —Thylias Moss

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt the heart of Repetition Nineteen are twenty-five unreliable translations of a poem in Mónica de la Torre’s first book, written in Spanish. She embarked on this new genre-defying project after realizing she had been living in New York for as long as she had lived in Mexico City, where she was born. The works here focus on translation as displacement, mediation, and a form of code-switching. In the latter half of the book, “Replay,” we get a glimpse of de la Torre's translation practice in action as she invites passers-by to participate in series of translation experiments during an artist residency in Madison Square Park. Given the nativism of our current climate, both halves of Repetition Nineteen celebrate translation’s possibilities and political relevancy.Trade Review"Mónica De la Torre’s kinetic, agitated, self-conscious, and super-smart collection warns us, delightfully, 'let’s not overthink this,' even as it aspires to many 'an optical conundrum / psychoactive puzzle.' The purposefully uneven, sometimes bilingual free verse does not so much occupy territory as sprint back and forth—ties knots, unravels and ravels nets— to tally up its 'in-between state,' taking place as it does between Mexico and the U.S., between a heritage of radical experiment and an urgency of saying."—Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets "By presenting the reader with twenty-five different translations of the same poem—which deliberately raises questions about what it means for multiple poems to have 'sameness,' or to come from the same 'source' poem—de la Torre implicitly argues for the translations as a sort of palimpsest or layering-over." —Connor Fisher, Colorado Review "Repetition Nineteen is an interactive book of opportunity and possibility, a spirited exploration of the cultural differences of the use of language. How much is too much or too little to speak or write, or is this unquantifiable and more dependent on what is said? Which parts of a work should we illuminate or eliminate to convey a certain effect? Language in any form is a versatile gift, and de la Torre presents it to us, wraps and unwraps it, each time with a new balance and resonance."—Bethany Mary, Vagabond City "Simply one of the most unique collections of contemporary poetry, Repetition Nineteen is focused on translation as communication, confusion, displacement and opportunity."—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine "Via English and Spanish, De la Torre explores the relationship between all languages, their translatability and the interpretation ability of artificial intelligences such as the speech recognizer in Siri."—Terras Mag "An essential read for anyone interested in translation, Repetition Nineteen combines object lessons and treatises, ultimately asking whether any act of replication can be faithful, or if every act births new creation. Through humor and experimentation, de la Torre makes the philosophical playful and the playful profound."—Emily Pérez, RHINO "This book is a playful, warm, smart and simplemente pinche genial exploration of language via translation—its rhythms, shortcomings, architectures, and possibilities. Mónica de la Torre’s bilingual brain allows no room for platitude or complacency, and reawakens our curiosity for everything it contemplates."—Valeria Luiselli "'Heads up, false friends!' This is the carnival of (mis)translation. Mark the clues 1-5 and merrily go round and round a Spanish poem that is not there. You don't care. You're having too much fun. Then time for revelation and analysis: the original poem and the mechanics of the carrousel. Notes on method, on translation in general, the bias of machines, a delightful aside on Cervantes. So many ways of exploring the space between two languages! Lastly, 'Replay' documents a playful workshop, i.e. invites you to join in. Don't hesitate!"—Rosmarie Waldrop "When received genres of living are no longer sufficient, one can begin to imagine new ways of relating that are as ethically driven as they are delightful. Enter Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen, which allows the many-chambered heart of translatory practice to reroute the detritus of techno-nationalism, monolingualism, fixed origins, and originals. Conceptual, comical, deeply personal, moving somewhere between borders, between the serial and the multiple, the paratextual and the metatextual, this book constellates languages to show us how they touch us every day, in every media, in each mode of writing—translation, mistranslation, critical inquiry, autobiography, public performance. Like Eva Hesse’s Repetition Nineteen III, where an array of translucent forms, each a subtle variation of a form and thereby slightly irregular as each of us, we are invited to form as a way of feeling in all its forms. We are reminded that 'different types of love are possible.'"—Christian Hawkey "To begin, Mónica de la Torre is dope. Prose, poetry and the annals of workshop as installation cohabit here as an evolving unit of systems that unearth not only the absurd but just how much popular songs might share space with soccer tournaments. De la Torre is just as concerned with the precision of recounting events, the rendering and extraction of new texts informed by Vicuña and Yépez, adventures into Google Translate, the global impact of Siri, and other marvelous wonders via Emojiland as she is with where Spanish has embedded itself in the North American mind. Out of order or from front to back, the discourse is evident, right on the money, and right on time. There is no one way to read Repetition Nineteen. Granted, this wonder may finally be the book I need to finish my book."—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn her original author’s note to the 1999 edition, Akilah Oliver writes,“What I am trying to do in these poems is investigate the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.” the she said dialogues: flesh memory proves to be not only still timely twenty years later, but essential reading for understanding intersectional politics and poetics in our current moment.Trade Review"Oliver passed away in 2011, and many poems read like benedictions, but what strikes me is how useful dialogues feels now. These poems affirm a Black queerness and a poetics of the body, while also mourning and questioning what these things might mean: It is a “pleasure to be here earthling in this time of seductive tears staining the ground of our planet.”"—Ken Chen, NPR"the she said dialogues: flesh memory is not your usual debut collection and maybe that’s because it is the work of an already mature poet, in her late thirties, and embodies a fully realized and distinctive aesthetic. In particular, her reconception of the poetic line is what gives the work its power… It’s the sequencing of such units within each line that gives Oliver’s best poems their serendipitous capaciousness, their unhistrionic emotional frankness, and their urgent rhythm—a distinctive sense of measure that reminds me of no one else’s."—Tourniquet Review“I’m constantly surprised by Akilah Oliver’s poems, pieces. I’m watching her meanings slosh. Rhythms settle and rule. Quirky things come in: general hospital, junk antiques, 1948 . . . everything bobbing. It’s wonderous finally, eventually, always what language can be in the thrall of a compassionate and intricate sprit. The world changes around me and I know something new. With terrific ease her poems make the point that language is erotic. In a surgent moment of reading and writing, a voice bursts out of the foam, this tough new Aphrodite. She’s commanding and dangerous. Awake and alive.”—Eileen Myles"Akilah Oliver’s dialogues remind me of a series of containers frantically held and I’m watching her meanings slosh. I’m constantly surprised by her poems, pieces. They unloose every handle I make for them. Rhythms settle and rule. Quirky things come in: general hospital, junk antiques, 1948…stuff bobs in her solution, but it’s wonderous finally, eventually ultimately what language can be in the thrall of a compassionate and intricate sprit. And the world changes around me because I know something new. Her poems are erotic which is beside the point. The point is that language is erotic. Always was. In the midst of a beautiful surging moment of reading and writing, a voice bursts out of the foam, this tough new Venus. She’s commanding and dangerous. Awake and alive."–Eileen Myles "From multiple and shifting subject positions, Akilah Oliver surveys the complex terrain of identity and sexuality with a concise intellectually engaged poetic language. As her sacred duty, she bares the naked truth of the double-edged poet’s word. This bolder sister outsider brings the sound of her distinct dream to the fanfare for the next millennium."—Harryette Mullen

Read more less

Book SynopsisHistorically, much landscape art has reinforced binaries such as inside/outside, subject/object, and culture/nature, thus reducing a complex network to an ornament that reinforces a sense of human power over nature, imposes specific cultural values, and/or claims or exercises control. And yet there are also artists who have developed alternatives to conventional depictions of the world around them, using landscape to participate in the earth, active in its view and its viewing. The art addressed in the book presents landscape as engagement rather than as detached observation, encouraging an increased sense of belonging to, and thus responsibility for, the earth.Trade Review"Such artists of earlier eras suggested, intentionally or not, that we might enlarge our viewpoint beyond the personal, maybe even beyond the human. But it fell to twentieth-century art movements—abstraction, Cubism, postmodernism—to consciously undo the Enlightenment paradigm. As a contemporary poet, Swensen wields a language capable of channeling this history."—Boston Review"Eschewing the overt didacticism of many environmentally engaged projects, Art in Time guides by example. Most significantly, Swensen’s exploration of the temporal, relational nature of art-making recognizes the deep interconnectedness of all that share this world. The essays attend to the primary importance of diversity to the project of developing non-destructive relationships to our planet — biodiversity, identity diversity, diversity of medium, and expression — all of which unfold via unique temporal registers."—LARB"Art in Time is a brilliant foray into twenty-one artists’ films, paintings, photographs, and art installations—and the lives out of which the work grows. Critical and poetic, sensitive and probing, Swensen reminds us of the community, the labor, and the commitment a life in art both requires and creates."—EcoTheo"Changing subjectivities; relations accumulating and multiplying among land, people, animals, trees, weather; the hand reaching toward—the thrall of the collection is impressively constructed... I stamp my foot in applause, write notes on the pages, distribute my thoughts; Swensen makes of 'viewing' a muscular verb."—Colorado Review"Art in Time is a book that resists the idea of it ever becoming a 'timeless work of art.' For poet, translator, and academic Cole Swensen, the very notion of a 'timeless work of art' not only implies a refusal to engage with the present moment, but also exposes a fundamental problem in our viewership: our tendency of looking at rather than from within."—LIT Magazine"In this book, Cole Swensen challenges the tension between land and landscape and the relative relationship of each to ‘reality'—and her instinct is infallible. She's a guide, a mentor, a blessing, an event. She explores the thinking behind the works of numerous artists who elevate contemporary culture to our highest expectations."—Etel Adnan "I can't think of another writer who writes as precisely and insightfully as Cole Swensen about humans contemplating a landscape, and the perceptions and associations implied by the use of such terms as 'vastness' and 'timeless.' In the 20 poem-essays (or are they encyclopedia entries?) that make up Art in Time, Swensen writes about a wide range of singular figures: Robert Smithson, Agnes Varda, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Rosa Bonheur, Chaïm Soutine, Joan Jonas, Irving Petlin, and Renee Gladman. Brimming with fresh and precise readings, full of little known details and revelations, Art in Time is that rare book. You will want to bring it with you when walking in the woods, visiting a National Park, driving in the desert, or going to a museum. In these pages, you will discover insights into artists that you thought you knew and ones that you have never heard of before. You will begin thinking about landscapes differently."—John Yau"Art In Time is made up of twenty sequences of lyric prose composed as essay-poems, each of which examines a particular artist’s work… Her essay-poems exist as a blend of research, commentary and critique around a field or fields of movement by her chosen artist, and on their chosen work or works… As Swensen describes through her introduction, the pieces in Art In Time exist as an extended essay on depictions of and approaches toward landscape through visual art, layered through individual 'chapters' around individual artists."—rob mclennan

Read more less

Book Synopsis"Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—The New York TimesFINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of AmericaSet in a speculative present, Madness alternates between poetry and editorial commentary to investigate how language spans a life.Madness is a selected poems for a fictional poet: Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a minor name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. This is a story of the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.Trade Review"In his innovative fourth poetry collection, Madness, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué imagines the life and work of a fictional 'minor' poet named Luis Montes-Torres, who is said to have been born in 1976 and to have died of complications from brain cancer at the age of 58, in 2035... Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—Christopher Soto, The New York Times"Under the guise of reclaiming an imaginary, unsung poet, Ojeda-Sagué moves between biographical notes and poetry in a thoughtfully orchestrated contrapuntal exploration of mental health and its effects on human creativity."—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet"While Madness doesn’t destroy the book as a form, it does make of it a kind of origami, a book with three dimensions, an art object."—Tyler Barton, Autofocus"Clever and captivating, Madness explodes the boundaries of what poetry can be, what it can look like, and what work it can do. It’s a poetry collection that reads like a novel, grappling with topics of temporality, reality, identity, and belonging."—Willem Finn Harling, Lambda Literary"The reader of Madness may very well wonder which of today’s threats will resurface a mere thirteen years from now, at the time of a fictional poet’s decease. Whatever they may be, perhaps our familiar lives of artistic struggles and life-long loves will continue as they do for Luis Montes-Torres, and as Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué imagines they will in Madness. It may be the fog of daily continuity that is indeed the madness the poet directs us to see."—Eric Aldrich, Rain Taxi"Through the creation of Montes-Torres, there is something very freeing in the way Ojeda-Sagué composes this range of a life’s work, and this range of a life, offering the ebbs and flows of biography across an array of literary forms, from short lyrics to diary entries to longer stretches of prose. Ojeda-Sagué offers how writing is constructed, and a character as well, and how it all might begin to slowly unravel."—rob mclennan's blog"Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s grand confection in Madness is the fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres. Through his selected poems and biographical mini-essays by fictional coeditors, Ojeda-Sagué constitutes a meditation on a poet’s life, the life of a queer Cuban immigrant, the life of hermetic sweetness and depression, with a yearning love for nature, boyfriend and dogs. Montes-Torres’s body of work is all assertion and retreat, formally adventurous, traditionally lyrical, obscure and combative. He inhabits the kind of poetry world that Roberto Bolaño lovingly described, of idealism, ambition, obscure prizes, and editions of three hundred, that happens to be ours. Looking back from 2055, Montes-Torres is presented as a minor poet, and that may be Ojeda-Sagué’s biggest ruse because, Reader, these poems will ravish you with beauty, idealism and ambition."—Robert Glück"Sprung from the wildly inventive mind of Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Madness represents the selected poems of fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035). The book flows luxuriously between poetry, biography, and what I'm tempted to call speculative fiction. Ojeda-Sagué displays a dexterity with a wide range of forms, from short lyrics to long poems to diary entries. As this imagined poet's biography unfolds, the book shifts and slips and curls, and throughout we remain captivated and intrigued as travel companions. What a pleasure to be invited into the life and poems of an extraordinary person-after all, aren't we all ordinary and extra, 'nervous and breathing,' trying to find 'a measure arranged into tenderness'?"—Alli Warren"Literary heir to Fernando Pessoa, Jack Spicer, Reinaldo Arenas, John Weiners, and Benno von Archimboldi, once and future poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035) endures in poems of enabling welcome into 'someone’s hallucination.' Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s desire for desdoblamiento engenders a poetry of self-possession that wonders, with ear attuned to attachment and mood, who is anybody writing for? His fictional coeditors have expertly selected from nine books Montes-Torres bequeathed us in small press editions—lifetimes yet to come that speak the twin language of good-natured cubist intimacy and exile culture shock. In Ojeda-Sagué’s self-fable—a tribute to immigrant dwelling and descent—'every repetition is / a little ghost of me waving / from an echo.'”—Roberto Tejada

Read more less

Book SynopsisA reissue of the Santa Clara County poet laureate's lauded second book that deals with translation, grief, and reflection of lineage and identity. like a solid to a shadow is a documentary poetry collection about grieving, fatherlessness, and the limitations of language. Sapigao finds her deceased father’s love ‘letters’ to her mother: cassette tapes recorded in Illokano, a language of which she has imperfect knowledge. The book moves through Sapigao’s process of translating and transcribing the tapes; playing with, learning, and unlearning the Ilokano and English languages. This book then launches from the tapes to ask “what can we really know?” when it comes to family lineages and personal histories. Through family trees, photos, and mapping, Sapigao articulates, distorts, and heals her knowledge of the man who is her deceased father.Trade Review“Sapigao dedicates her second collection to an intriguing project of translation as a means of reckoning with identity and trauma. Her father, who died when she was six, had recorded spoken love letters in the Filipino language Ilokano to her mother and grandparents... Sapigao’s 'imperfect translation' is worth the work of the journey.”—Publishers Weekly"like a solid to a shadow is a hidden gem of a piece to read if you want to experience the vastness of not having answers, exploring one’s roots, loss and grieving, dying languages, and healing."—Antonia Dorn, International Examiner

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of poems that explores the radical love inherent in revolutionary work through cultural objects, adolescent affect, and queerness from within the fall of empire. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive queer punk movement that emerged in Spain during its transition from Franquist Fascism to democracy, La Movida moves from bed to street to river, defending memory and falling in love along the way.Trade Review"Inspiration: handy stuff, if you can find it. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta secured theirs in the revolutionary struggles of Chicana feminists and Spain’s Post-Franco queer punk movement, so this collection doesn’t play nice with fascists and colonizers.”—Matt Sutherland, Foreword"In their second book La Movida, they write, 'The dancing water / replaced my tongue with a knife.' These are the shifts I so often find myself drawn to in poetry. Crackling images, with language as a means to become something more empowered."—Diana Arterian, Literary Hub"These poems are witty, incredibly smart and playful, and hold incredible weight, stitched together through romantic love, delightful optimism, nightmares and scar tissue."—rob mclennan"Both raw & elegant, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida embraces the vulnerability of the individual who finds strength in collective struggle. Whether driven by 'desire, or / the agonizing pleasure / of self-torture,' here, they exist 'in complicated love.' Here, they know no 'better / way to deal with a broken / heart than a riot.' Here, 'virgo could be / [their] gender, or / it could be [their] sexuality.' Among marigolds, razors, crystal balls and natal charts, Luboviski-Acosta recovers the potency of the wail of La Llorona, a 'wail [that] will drown you, too.'”—Wendy Trevino"At once soft and jarring, LA MOVIDA walks a morbid path through fields of corporeal indulgence, introspection and repulsion—submission and protest. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s work voices keen self-observation, and a fiercely unique power to confront and envelope simultaneously, with compassion. One is crushed and sustained by the weight of these careful, assertive pieces."—Liz Harris"There is an easy voice here both guileless and full of guile, sometimes full of adult world-weariness sometimes as naïve as a child, then looking at its own naïeveté and laughing, and showing us its wounds, a little proudly, a little insouciantly. La Movida is romantic, filled with love and longing and friendship and revolution. It is also Romantic in the old sense of the poetic tradition. Here is a poet who is willing—even desirous—to be torn apart for a glimpse of Beauty."—Julian Talamantez Brolaski"Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida is an ecstatic shriek, a horror-feminist wail-song bellowing from a dark pit, where the ones covered in lucent blood vibrate with the eros of insurrection. Witchy, unapologetic, mythic—these incandescent poems avow, with a queer punk irreverence, the dismembering force of desire and the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial vengeance. Let yourself be cut by Luboviski-Acosta’s razor-sharp verse."—Jackie Wang

Read more less