Poetry / Poems

Book SynopsisKnown to his contemporaries primarily as an art critic, but ambitious to secure a more lasting literary legacy, Parisian bohemian Charles Baudelaire, spent much of the 1840s composing gritty, often perverse, poems that expressed his disgust with the banality of modern city life. First published in 1857, the book that collected these poems together, Les Fleurs du mal, was an instant sensation—earning Baudelaire plaudits and, simultaneously, disrepute. Only a year after Gustave Flaubert had endured his own public trial for published indecency (for Madame Bovary), a French court declared Les Fleurs du mal an offense against public morals and six poems within it were immediately suppressed (a ruling that would not be reversed until 1949, nearly a century after Baudelaire’s untimely death). Subsequent editions expanded on the original, including new poems that have since been recognised as Baudelaire’s masterpieces, producing a body of work that stands as the most consequential, controversial and influential book of poetry from the nineteenth century. Acclaimed translator and poet Aaron Poochigian tackles this revolutionary text with an ear attuned to Baudelaire’s lyrical innovations—rendering them in “an assertive blend of full and slant rhymes and fluent iambs” (A.E. Stallings)—and an intuitive feel for the work’s dark and brooding mood. Poochigian’s version captures the incantatory, almost magical, effect of the original—reanimating for today’s reader Baudelaire’s “unfailing vision” that “trumpeted the space and light of the future” (Patti Smith). An introduction by Dana Gioia offers a probing reassessment of the supreme artistry of Baudelaire’s masterpiece, and an afterword by Daniel Handler explores its continued relevance and appeal. Featuring the poems in English and French, this deluxe dual-language edition allows readers to commune both with the original poems and with these electric, revelatory translations.Trade Review"Charles Baudelaire ‘imbued sordid scenes with religious grace’, says Dana Gioia, in his excellent introduction to The Flowers of Evil, Aaron Poochigian’s new translation of Baudelaire’s masterpiece Les fleurs du mal. That blend of beauty and squalor shines through in Poochigian’s lilting version of this uncharacteristically quiet poem [#122 'The Death of the Poor'], one of a series reflecting on death." -- The Telegraph

Read more less

Book SynopsisThese poems follow the aftermath of and recovery from trauma. Amanda Larson’s Gut begins with an epigraph from Frank O’Hara: “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.” From there, Larson launches an unflinching interrogation of how a young woman maintains agency in the wake of trauma, violence, and desire. Larson spins a conversation between works of feminist theory—including the those of Cathy Caruth, Susan Bordo, Patricia Hill Collins, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, and bell hooks—and her own experiences. The book moves through Larson’s recovery while questioning the limits of the very term and of language as a whole. She employs a variety of different forms, including prose, Q&A poems, and a timeline, reflecting both the speaker’s obsession with control and her growing willingness to let it go. With a measured voice, Larson finds a path for how to move beyond logic during processes of trauma and recovery.Gut won the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest, selected by Jericho Brown. Trade Review“Gut is a daring book of poetry that reminds us of Plato’s arguments. Larson follows thought, reason, and logic to show that none of these make sense of assault or abuse: ‘Before those things happened to me, I had been trying to argue my way out.’ And yet, this is not one of the philosopher’s dialogues. This is poetry that takes risks in form and content such that everything about it is unexpected. The plain-spoken nature of Larson’s admissions here are buoyed by her unflinching commitment to craft in sentences, in lines, and in Q&As. But be warned: this is not an easy read. It is, instead, a necessary read. I find much of the work here frightening. And I find that because the truth will scare us. This is a stunning debut.” -- Jericho Brown, judge of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest and author of The Tradition“Larson’s Gut is a tremendous poetry book. Sharp and precise, this collection—which is both essay and poem, self-elegy and self-interrogation—highlights the epistemological anxiety of the mind after trauma. Memory serves as a lens through which the self and desire are scrutinized and mourned; at the center of this formally inventive debut is the body, which, once violated, guts open consciousness, and creates an excruciating, slippery unraveling. Larson’s poems are an attempt to revisit, reorder, and restore something psychologically intricate and painful. The result is a beautiful, moving, and singular debut. Gut announces a surprising, cerebral, and essential new poetic voice.” -- Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage“Larson’s debut collection, Gut, is more than a dazzling rejection of silence or the yield on some annihilating trauma, but frankly a revelatory performance of a rapacious intellect in consort with a body that values more than what the world can offer. Such palpable and vulnerable language is the aftermath of courage and beauty and open dreams.” -- Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man“I would pay attention to Larson. She's the real deal.” -- Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems“Imagine the story of a sexual trauma told solely by what happened to its victim afterward -- not physically but philosophically. It sounds improbable, but although the speaker never depicts or describes the violence, and refuses to aestheticize it, she isn't being coy; she's merely telling the story in a way that makes the perpetrator irrelevant. Read this book and watch its so-called victim become powerful.” -- Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness/ 300 Arguments

Read more less

Book SynopsisLyrical, aphoristic poems that move between forms and consider tropes of narrative. The narrator of Anon opens the sluice gates of embittered confession and philosophical reproach to release a flood of extravagant lyricism. These poems at first submerge readers in the ecstatic rhythms of its music, then they turn to address the tropes of narrative, inviting readers to join in pursuit of major themes of the human condition. Steven Seidenberg employs a characteristically aphoristic style to manage multiple lines of inquiry at once. The resultant fragments navigate between testament and treatise, storyline and system, and in a manner that echoes the speculative vehemence of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, and Maurice Blanchot Trade Review“On these aphoristic seas made of ‘nothing but words’ we sail on vast lexicons of maritime lore. From Ahab’s bitter conquest to Noah’s weathered flood, Anon musters ‘the allegory out of which this repetition issues, as a dreamer stepping into the miasma of the dream,’, each dense aphorism a verbiage ocean or island ‘describing the presence of an absence’; each imperiled mandate to divergence another ‘telling by revealing the perversity of the told.’ Seidenberg’s recursive, lyrical explorations of time and narrative, knowledge and beauty, float through an archipelago of ‘lapidary prosody,’ an ever more insistent ‘interregnum of ellipses,’ part Melville, part Wittgenstein, part Kant, until the narrator’s ecstatic realization—'Memory is taken back and given by the ocean . . . ; gleaners such as you and I, are alone enjoined to make a survey of the wreckage, and fashion what remains into . . .’ Anon is that survey and that fashioning, all to submerge its readers in this shimmering sea mirage, in which we luxuriate while we plumb the mysteries of the abyss.” -- Susan Gervirtz, author of Hotel abc"Marvelously at sea in swells of voluptuous language, this narrative unravels itself faster than the narrator can weave it, leaving in its wake a great momentum that keeps identity fluid across a shifting scape of ever-changing ocean. Anon draws on both senses of the word; the I that tries to tell us its story dissolves into its very telling while eternally deferring its landing. Seidenberg's command of language is astonishing, building up into great orchestral swells that carry us along in the sheer beauty of their sound—it's a tour de force of linguistic imagination." -- Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis beautiful poetry anthology offers a warm, inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal-an evocative celebration of our connection to the green world.Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry's exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. A foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reflective pauses and personal recipes from some of the contributing poets, along with original, whimsical illustrations by Melissa Castrillon, and a ribbon bookmark complete this stunning, hardcover gift format.

Read more less

Book SynopsisObsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower.Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release. From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,&

Read more less

Book SynopsisA formally inventive debut collection of poetry driven by narrative and character. In this poetry collection, JD Debris focuses on characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book’s heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sánchez as he avenges his sister’s sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy “man in dusk-colored glasses.” As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves. The Scorpion’s Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts—boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion’s tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension. The Scorpion’s Question Mark was the winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Trade Review“What a gift of storytelling, in such deft, memorable music. And, such an eye for detail!—the kind of detail that tells volumes. Listen, for instance, to this: ‘Cleaning his pistole, he must hum softly.’ So much power in this work, this music, and tone. Listen, also, to this: ‘What ridiculous luck, living long enough to sing / how your father was murdered by false policemen. / What ridiculous luck to make it through the chorus.’ I love this poet’s work.” -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"The Scorpion’s Question Mark delivers a poetry of lyrical sway, crisscrossing several cultures and languages, with a sound all its own, and does not apologize for natural earthiness. Each reader and listener must be ready to sing and dance, to engage gut feelings and modern realism. The Scorpion’s Question Mark deals in personal and public truths, a courageous voice of sheer beauty." -- Yusef Komunyakaa"All praise to Debris’s astonishing debut collection, The Scorpion’s Question Mark. Born of trumpet sway and the breath of strings, this book never misses a beat. Like a soulful corrido, he skillfully gives voice to a fractured past. Every turn of the page is a streetwise sonic sojourn, a barefoot samba, a bob and weave, a rhythm of return. Debris offers moments of enlightenment and uplift, 'as if I could fit every not-yet-forgotten name of my fallen / into a single comma-savaged sentence.' These poems sing!" -- January Gill O’Neil

Read more less

Book SynopsisPoems that consider the instability of identity through fictional and religious characters. In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell’s collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers—from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville’s Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab’s leg, Ishmael’s arm, and Pierre’s severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems—the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Tomaž Šalamun—are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting. Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost—even when right at home, even in our own bodies. Trade Review"In Ishmael Mask, Kell asks us to consider our existence, not in the context of a physical and metaphorical cage we might free ourselves from, but in the context of our wanderings through an often surreal, ultimately unknowable landscape. The literary characters who accompany him become subsumed into collection’s searching self, fellow companions whose creators he freely borrows from. They pull him back from the abyss and provide a frame to temper chaos. In Kell’s hands, the act of art-making becomes the means by which we embrace our deep sense of connectedness. . . . Ishmael Mask explores obsession, passion, and absurdity, leading us to the edge of the abyss. When we arrive, rather than falling, we revel." * Valparaiso Poetry Review *“We Americans are all imaginary orphans, forever seeking a new name, a new carapace, and the further adventure. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is thus a motto more proper to our republic, and more forward-looking, than ‘E Pluribus Unum.’ In Ishmael Mask, Kell has parsed the fossil record of our orphancy in beautiful and unguarded detail; he has adventured much and withheld nothing. For those who come to poetry in search of a credible future, Kell will prove to be a true and unfailingly honest companion.” -- Donald Revell, author of The English Boat“How does one hammer memory onto the page without nails or bullets? Kell wails his own mnemonic siren through the literary specter of Herman Melville’s Pierre, Kafka, etc., and we wail with him like a stone who can easily weep, but we don’t. There is touchless erection in this book and drowning and death and suicide and a ‘rat runs in small circles where the green hat used to lie’ and may suggest life and pain and existential revisitations have cast shadows that are bigger than meadows. Perhaps in this collection Kell is yelling from the top of his lungs, but all we could hear is wind and January or ‘black, red, green spiral of smoke.’ Or perhaps Kell and his poetry are a cellar we all wish we could descend into to grab mason jars of beauty and grace in times of existential hunger and famine.” -- Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish Carcass“Poetry is rarely so vividly an art of the face to face as it is in Kell's Ishmael Mask: the faces of the dead, the faces in the mirror, the faces of the lover, blurred by presence and distance. These poems, shadowed by Melville and Kafka, are also a history of one poet's encounters with the inscrutable relentlessness of fate and the inevitable privacy of suffering. ‘One can draw loss, draw frost, without anyone knowing,’ he writes. Yet knowing here becomes his reader's privilege, an unveiling slowly emerging through the voice of his haunting, indelible, lines.” -- Susan Stewart, author of Cinder: New and Selected Poems

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world.Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds,

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisAlisoun Sings finds its starting-point with Chaucer’s iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Her forceful voice leads the way across narratives of genders, and addresses the brutality of social conventions with caustic humor. This labyrinthine text navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English, beyond its dominance as a global lingua franca, and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages.Trade Review"There’s something echt modernist about Caroline Bergvall’s longterm project of turning over, repurposing, and generally fucking around with the western canon…Begvall’s Alisoun has the linguistic panache, the historical learning, and the theoretical chops not merely to rehearse a thousand years of oppression and resistance, but to offer in the poem’s final passages an infectiously uplifting—even for the cynical—call to arms."—Mark Scroggins, Hyperallergic "The language evolves here, making Alisoun solidly in the forgotten and misunderstood past, while invading the present. This is a manifesto, an affirmation of identity, a recognition of a voice finally given shape."—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions "In Alisoun you find it also in the pronouns, with 'het, hem, em,' which allows us to rethink what is actually being said: Is it a pronoun? Is it a verb? That kind of play on the pronoun is similarly translated. Rather than having a translator go from A to B, it becomes an AB-type thing. Translation doesn’t have a resting point neither here nor there. But it spans that stretch. It comes across so many interactions. There’s no final mastery in translation because it’s taken over by the performative one way or another."—Greg Nissan, BOMB "Bergvall turns ‘illegibility’ on its head: she insists on a poetics that is neither merely read nor impossible to read. Instead, Bergvall attempts to offer another way of being, necessarily multiple. This affords space for unknowing, for the unrecognizable, where political vision and perhaps even political intimacy and solidarity does not require immediate recognition within our normative configurations of the sensible and knowable."—Rebecca Teich, The Poetry Project Newsletter "Love binds, love connects. And through Bergvall’s ongoing commitments, those bindings and connections are explored thoroughly and beautifully. Closing the trilogy, finding the last poem, contains a bit of heartache, a sighing wish for Bergvall to continue. But, in fact, I won’t be surprised if that’s indeed what happens, if Bergvall finds yet another extension to this ongoing work. As Alisoun says in the book’s final poem, 'The era of ma tellings nat bygone, just bigonne.' As symbol, as voice, as voices, there is much yet to read, many more moments to listen."—Greg Bem, Rain Taxi "Resounding. Re-sounding. Resonance is the name of the game Caroline Bergvall presents in all those language games she plays seriously, and serially, more than totally."—Kyoo Lee, Spittoon Collective "If we cluster, grow broader, aggregate, say yes to both ourselves and the needs of those outside our own immediacies, Alisoun suggests that we will be in good company for the work of pleasurable, collective living."—Charles Theonia, Jacket2 “Caroline Bergvall brings exceptional linguistic range and sensitivity, active engagement, dynamic experimentation and intellectual passion to her poetic and artistic creations.”—Marina Warner “It made me laugh out loud in some sections, nod wisely in others, want to chorus a ‘yes!’ here, and a ‘go-girl’ there. I love its generosity, and its collectivity, its command and range of tone and style, its stylishness, and its many voices. A woman from the fourteenth century and a poet from the twenty-first join forces to tell it how it is. Chaucer better watch out.”—Clare Lees “Alisoun’s been to hell and back as an art and fashion loving, potty mouthed, unaccommodating desiring feminist queer mother-of-us-all disobedient and irrepressible and ever deep and vulnerable language breaker.”—Rachel Levitsky “As a reader the work is transportive, I enter a new and unfamiliar space as I read this, it feels almost archaeological in nature. There are worm holes here, carved out through space and language, stories and places, centuries collapse, gaps in time dissipate, the medieval and the modern merge.”—Rachel Lichtenstein “Ecofeminist writer and performer Caroline Bergvall follows her earlier brilliant Meddle English by dialoguing with, not quite melding into, Chaucer’s vernacular muse, the Wife of Bath. An inspired, tragi-hilarious mixing and meddling of modern and medieval Englishes, a rallying cry for bio- and-linguistic diversity, a ferocious unleashing of sexual and bodily power.”—David Wallace

Read more less

Book Synopsis2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALISTJackie Wang’s magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.Trade Review"Here dreams are spaces of radical possibility, and as in the real world, the possibilities are sometimes magical and sometimes nightmarish and sometimes both, like dress rehearsals for the apocalypse."—The New York Times"In this extraordinary debut, Wang (Carceral Capitalism) creates a symbolist dream diary for catastrophic times... The book engages with climate change and the apocalyptic, asking, 'Can a book parry catastrophe?"—Starred review in Publishers Weekly"Writer Jackie Wang documented her dreams and sculpted them into poems for her debut collection The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void. The book is a surrealist expression of how social processes and traumas show up in our dreams, and how we can better understand ourselves by tuning into them."—NPR Morning Edition "The act of writing the dream is itself one of interpretation, but here those interpretations are loose and wild; Wang doesn’t give us a stable blueprint. This book’s revolutionary consciousness is lodged in the act of trying to write and live with something unknowable."—The Nation"The spell of this book preserves the multiple-layered, multiple-petaled nature of life. Wang’s collection professes the potency of dream and sunflower; it professes the persistence of powers that save."—The Brooklyn Rail"Wang’s collection takes us to all the unfathomable places we sometimes find ourselves in, and reminds us there is also hope and brightness and bravery."—Electric Lit"Wang’s debut collection, formally diverse and marked with a sardonic tinge, suggests a porous border between the dream and waking worlds."—The Millions"Dreams, Wang indicates, offer a radical means of reconfiguring the terrain of the present, working through interior and social responses to calamity, intimating different realities. Wang’s poems reshape the hermetic and confounding work of dreams to reveal these secret capacities, there all along."—Public Books“'Can a book parry catastrophe?' Jackie Wang (heliomancer, revelator, poet) asks, in a book that not only parries catastrophe, but climbs, through its eye, into its mind, into its fantasy even. From the blistering seat of that overwhelming perspective, Wang begins calling catastrophe back from storming and suffering itself onto others (community, friendships, the future), by counting and recounting, in the most irreproachably neon vocabulary, dreams, translations of dreams, which are, as reclamations of logic and improvements of life, scenarios that together manifest an alternative method of survival: 'the sunflower book: It is code for love.'”—Brandon Shimoda "Jackie Wang’s new book asks questions that rotate/fluoresce against a backdrop or foreground of ceremonial apprenticeship, like sunflowers or the memories of sunflowers. In this other world, 'survivor trauma' is experienced by creatures and non-creatures alike. I was so moved by the mixtures of writing I encountered here: the “map” of a dream, but also the notebooks that 'fill up,' not always in the English of waking time. 'I want to write you without writing over you. I have something to tell you,' the speaker says, with the delicacy and directness of a sentence written directly on the skin. Kalan Sherrard’s illustrations echo this way of marking the page: a mode of companionship and witness in a book that did not end because it did not begin. Is this what it feels like to be a person?"—Bhanu Kapil "Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void is a gorgeous, ambitious, phantasmagoric lament for the better worlds our bodies tell us must be possible, every day, even when we’re numb with pain. It goes deeper into darkness—political darkness, the end of our days—than anything I’ve read in recent poetry. But the poems are also filled with shifting, glittering 'I’s' and 'you’s' that frame themselves for us then break their frames, repeatedly moving between poetry and meditations on “poetry” before becoming beautiful poetry again. I felt myself get lost and found in their address. I hope you will, as well."—Chris Nealon

Read more less

Book SynopsisActive Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.Trade Review"Active Reception knows that to be monstrous is to threaten the order of things and invites the reader to conspire: to enter or embrace one’s own capacity to be entered, to transform, to be implicated in all the juicy possibilities."—The Rumpus"These are the conceptual renderings of a gay choral orgy versed in language poetry. The release of rhythmic momentum is a delightful journey we follow to completion. A sonic pulse, a generously erotic beat. The past is something that isn’t over. Like heirlooms, bottoming is passed down from one generation to the next. Intergenerational pleasure is a modular form of queer kinship."—Adroit Journal"Encountering Active Reception is a playful challenge, a flirt drawn out beyond its limits. I am unmoored by every slash, all ruptured phonetics and syntax, find joy in the multiple routes made possible in and out of sense-making and associative logics."—Full Stop "Active Reception—a book of words or worlds, holes or wholes—is visual ecstasy and Noah Ross is a true radical."—Action Books Blog"The phenomenology of bottoming has rarely if ever received as brilliant a sounding or as voracious an investigation as Noah Ross gives the subject in Active Reception. Encountering this sense-expanding poem, this radical recital, I’m given delirious incentive to rethink my own relation to bodies, inside and out. Head-rushes and heart-rushes of affinity, of consanguinity, and a flushed sense of rekindled possibilities (for art, politics, sexuality) are the happy consequences, for this reader, of taking in the full measure of Ross’s call to action. The book’s visual and prosodic inventiveness matches its hot insistence on writing the body accurately, musically, with an appetite for the irregular mark and the unrestricted (yet tightly measured) flood."—Wayne Koestenbaum "This is a book of ambitious and wonderfully playful structures, fully realized as a book one can enter at any point, but not possibly, or easily, leave."—rob mclennan "Noah Ross’ Active Reception is a corporeal tapestry, a verso clench of membrane. Figuring the asshole not as absence or empty voicelessness, but as a form of the body’s narrative capability, Ross articulates gossip, disease, joy and dissolution in mucal blossom, snapped taut by typewriter ribbon. For him, the void is affective trap as much as it is a path of material discernment—a space where balances of labor, erotics, and power are liquidated in the queer mingling of blood and come as much as they’re made discrete, parceled out in a series of uneasy structural relations. Both a sensuous act of objection and an art of sensing oneself as object, what Ross posits is no ascetic ideology nor wasteful orgy, but a true perversity of politics. Active Reception mirrors the slick ways in which we absorb and inhibit the violence of capitalist and carceral logics. How we love each other; an airless density, its thin ecstasy of paper cut. I can’t, I gag for it."—Trisha Low "Looking for a biblio high? Open this book. Watch an erotic, operatic, love-prone blossoming of architectonic, choreographic, historically futurist, empathically political, deeply liturgical, intellectually juicy, gravely hilarious, serious play. Active Reception voices and graphs spirits and humors flowing from pre-Chaucer to post-Spenser to present tensile Noah (Ross), thanks to whom—at last!— CINAEDORUM CARISSIMORUM can come out as pansy dear via Google Translate. Ross’s ecstatic lexicon activates gorgeously erudite choruses '[in trappings at the limit].' They sing neon nights and daze in 'a brilliance of clamoring.'"—Joan Retallack

Read more less

Book SynopsisMacArthur “genius” Douglas Crase is best known for his invocations of the American landscape and Transcendental tradition. Out of print since 1987, The Revisionist has been enough in some opinions to establish him as one of the most important poets of his generation. Its influence persists, says The Oxford Book of American Poetry, as a “formidable underground reputation.” By combining that book with Crase’s recent chapbook, The Astropastorals, Nightboat Books brings Crase’s underground reputation to a wider audience for the first time in thirty-two years.Trade Review"This is such anticipatory, massively omniscient edging work. It’s a tone you’d expect a poet to hit here or there but Doug hits it always and I don’t know that he 'knows,' or his poem knows but there’s a temptation as a reader to want to stay in it always. He’s not saying it’ll be okay. But even, not meekly, that there are patterns."—Eileen Myles "Crase looks at the city and the landscape with the amused, disabused eye of a lover. Revisionism, in his supple argumentative poetry, turns out to be something very close to love."—John Ashbery "Douglas Crase’s dancing eye or is it ear, lost, restless, nervous, and insistingly singular, charges words with the task of unmasking the ordinary. 'The reason for love is / retrieval.' I can’t think of a better time to revisit the poems in The Revisionist which now seem prophetic. With Astropastorals, his sharp eye continues to meticulously map the restless, shifting, ambiguities of the American scene."—Susan Howe "Thinking here has been arrayed with grace enough to belie its density. Crase’s linguistic domain is at once tantalizingly abstract yet present and palpable. His poems are alive on the tongue while being read and even more so days later, as a recollected fragment surfaces unbidden amid the flux of thought."—Albert Mobilio, Hyperallergic "Crase renders the most familiar tropes wonderfully strange, these 'revisions' of a received canon proving as subtle as they are provocative: 'A century Begins,' he explains in 'To the Light Fantastic,' 'begins because it discovered/ The rights of man, or unearthed light.' Elsewhere, wordplay suggests an ecstatic mystery: 'The mitigation remembers the mischief,/ And nothing’s repaired except to engender it/ Different. All things are wild/ In the service of objects.' This expertly framed volume marks a lasting contribution to American poetry."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Substantial poems very much addressed to a listening ear, sometimes identified as a loved-one, and spoken very correctly in a language of description and abstraction with distinct and logical use of figuration."—Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review "For Crase, desire is a way of starting again, if not quite starting anew, and it enjoins another longing, or hope: that your strongest attachments needn’t be your most appropriative ones. He dreams—sometimes rhapsodically, at other times ruefully—of acquisition without possession, and the work he adores lives this dream as a kind of calling (‘Anybody knows,’ Stein wrote, ‘how anybody calls out the name of anybody one loves’)."—Matthew Bevis, London Review of Books "I had heard that Douglas Crase’s only full collection, The Revisionist (1981), was something else, but I was still astonished to encounter its grand, cracked, almanac voice. The Revisionist and The Astropastorals (Carcanet), with a welcome introduction by Mark Ford, reprints all of Crase’s published verse from 1974 to 2000. The Revisionist’s 'sinuous, semi-abstract landscape poetry', as Ford puts it, evokes an America we are still trying to imagine today: 'What have we done? Is it true the English / Could have called Long Island as they did, Eden? / Anyway, if the seas keep warming up it will all be gone'”—Jeremey Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement "For various reasons, The Revisionist has stood as Crase’s sole book of poems for nearly forty years, and has long been out-of-print. Fortunately, it has just been reissued in a new edition by Nightboat Books, now gathered together with a more recent work titled The Astropastorals…The new edition features a valuable introduction by Mark Ford, who reminds us of the 'exclamations of wonder from poets and critics across the spectrum when it first appeared,' from Ashbery to Anthony Hecht to James Merrill."—Andrew Epstein, Locus Solus: The New York Poets "Douglas Crase’s poems are objects of profound and gentle beauty, both in their deliciously poised idiom, and in being monuments to the protean moments of a vast genera of life: civic, environmental, economic, stellar."—Sam Buchan-Watts, The London Magazine "That Crase's invocation of the Whitmanian poetic tradition can be so powerful after all these years of overuse and abuse is a small miracle of revisionism itself."—Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader "Crase is the master of complex, sinuous sentences that twist and loop and unfurl in the most unpredictable of ways."—Mark Ford, The Times Literary Supplement "[Crase's] subject is America, more specifically the spirit of place, for he writes of geology, colonial history, Federal architecture and a variety of landscapes...Like Merrill's and Ashbery's, his writing argues sinuously, often subordinating sentence elements and juggling contexts in an almost baroque way."—Charles Molewortz, The New York Times "The Astropastorals serves as a reminder that the history we are brooks no conclusion, so it remains in continual need of revisionists (and of The Revisionist). Crase's first book is not, after all, a closed case, a done deal. We still need him."—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic "The Revisionist is a lasting poetic achievement addressed to a once and future idea of a land driven by 'energies of terrible belief' and by a future 'hardly big enough for the past.' But for all the intoxicating urbanity of these poems in their syntax, reflexive mood, exalted octaves, panoramic desire, and no small feat of engineering, Douglas Crase’s rare artistry figures a capacious refusal to plead innocence. Instead, a 'circumstance of invasion' haunts U.S. American memory wherein 'every road leads home and none is getting there.' Even turning to the cosmos from the standpoint of earth, money, and 'the law of large numbers,' The Astropastorals wonder moreover what it means to be a 'guest among stars.' In Mark Ford’s superb introduction we meet again a poet of the day, an 'original and highly charged idiom' ready to restore 'the ebb and flow of belonging inherent in the idea of democracy.'”—Roberto Tejada

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father''s spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold''s incredible oeuvre included twenty-four novels, five collections of stories and essays, and eight nonfiction books. So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari''s twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. Thus was launched a lifesaving literary correspondence, and a testament to the bonds of family.The resulting poems are playful, honest, funny, and moving. Secrets are invoked alongside personal—and often painful—history. Ari and Ethan’s mother, Herbert Gold’s second wife, died in a helicopter crash alongside the famous rock promoter and impresario Bill Graham in 1991. Her ghost roams through the poems and th

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.Trade ReviewLonglisted for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Shortlisted for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry "The language I wish to speak / isn't contained in words," writes Julia Cimafiejeva, while giving us these moving words of witness and testimony, compelling poems of kinship, of bravery and fear and reckoning: "we came back for a visit," she writes, "only cemetery crosses / waved at us with rags / of their embroidered towels." There is so much lyricism in this painful reckoning, the language itself uplifts even as it doubts itself in a time of great upheaval: "I approach the territory of a foreign language / as a melancholy spy / I must steal a secret / of these strange hills." Poetry here doesn't just survive despite translation between languages, but because of it. And for that, my special gratitude is to Cimafiejeva's brilliant translators, Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib. The horrors of reality in today's Belarus, the beatings and tortures of prisoners, the eerie presence of Chernobyl disaster in these pages, all true, all heart-breaking, and all also somehow carried through to us by beautiful, memorable, unrelenting words.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic “Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield is a minefield of memory. I close my eyes, recall the events that unfolded in my own country in 2020 and 2021. The similarities of our recent histories—the stun grenades, rubber bullets, beatings, and detentions—are striking. Still, there’s no mistaking Motherfield’s singularity, which is to say Cimafiejeva’s dexterity.” —Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast "A dual-language publication, Motherfield reads like a testament to the innate multilingualism of Belarus. And after all, what Belarusians say matters just as much as what language they say it in. In Motherfield, Cimafiejeva has proved herself to be a bad student of fear. She wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles — the tongue." —Jennifer Wilson, The New York Times Book Review "A devastatingly beautiful and essential read." —Pierce Alquist, Book Riot "Motherfield is a forceful diptych pairing the poet’s protest diary (spanning the period from Belarus’ 2020 presidential election to March 2021, after the poet has settled in Austria) with poems flowing from days full of fear and hope." —Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books (Poetry Foundation) "Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements…In the end the speaker keeps a 'beaten hope' that 'builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.' This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names…[I]f Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future." —Jessica Johnson, Rain Taxi "This book is a sword; its poems cut through so much clutter to the white-hot wire of social, political, and personal injustice—warranted, searingly expressed, and yet somehow also nondogmatic, intuitively right, and artistically original. These poems speak volumes; to an astute reader, they can also serve as a warning. It is a voice that deserves and rewards our attention—hopefully you can give it yours." —Andrew Singer, World Literature Today

Read more less

Book SynopsisA four-part collection that stretches the possibilities of the poetic form, from the traditional to the experimental; from the simple to the highly complex. Deftly exploring math and science alongside the arts, Knit Ink is a collection that showcases the bounds of formal poetry. The poems in Knit Ink study special or simplified cases of established literary restrictions, such as anagrams and palindromes, and poetic forms, such as triolets and sonnets. Anthony Etherin''s own form, the aelindrome, creates its own constraint, while other invented forms represent structural indulgences—tests of technical complexity whose poetry lies as much in the grandeur of their architecture as in the content of their words. Containing four books whose composition took over a decade, Knit Ink (and Other Poems) sees the quintessential work of a formidable mind combined in a single edition for the first time.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Carapace Dancer, Natalia Toledo revisits some themes from her award-winning collection The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (tr. Clare Sullivan, Phoneme, 2015).Toledo returns to the landscape of her childhood where animals predict the future and grandmothers shape masa. Again, she questions Zapotec traditions even as she mourns their disappearance. But in these poems Toledo takes more risks: she exposes her pain and that of her people in images at once elegant and raw. Like the crab, she edges into the past, but the hard shell of experience or cynicism provides only temporary protection to the human vulnerability beneath it.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA page-turner featuring one of literature’s earliest female protagonists. Written in 1685, Transaction or the Description of the Entire Life of an Orphan by Way of Plaintful Threnodies, often referred to as Orphan Girl, is a valuable, long-lost, seventeenth-century poetic text that documents women’s writing in the early modern period. In this autobiographical account, Anna Stanislawska speaks confessionally and unsparingly about her life, from her infancy to her widowhood and withdrawal from the world. Stanislawska was an incomparable memoirist, revealing the depths of her private life in a manner not to be matched until modern times. One Body with Two Souls Entwined brings together this spirited poetic account with an in-depth introductory and literary commentary by Barry Keane. Together the book offers a remarkable piece of scholarly, translational, and dramaturgical work and puts it in context amid the backdrop of Polish history. Table of ContentsForeword Acknowledgments Introduction: One Body with Two Souls Entwined The Other Voice Historical Backdrop Stanislawska’s Early Life The Aesop Episode Olesnicki A Sacral Legacy Old Poland’s Feminist Zeitgeist An Other (and Yet the Same) Voice: A Note on the Translation Orphan Girl: The Olesnicki Episode Commentary Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisJack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. His exciting “choruses” – duets performed with his late wife Adelle – established him as a unique presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley’s radical radio station, for over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry from 1940 to 2005 that has been called “an oddball masterpiece ... the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life.” At eighty, Foley looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of dazzling, playful, and linguistically inventive poetry by one of Germany's finest writers, in a classic translation that honors the author's amazing verbal acrobatics.Christian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate—but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten—on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern’s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDiscover How Tagore’s Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own "Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcend all limits of language, culture, and nationality. In his writings, the poet and mystic takes us on a spiritual quest and gives us a glimpse of the infinite in the midst of the finite, unity at the heart of all diversity, and the Divine in all beings and things of the universe." —from the Preface bySwami Adiswarananda Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most influential mystic poets and teachers of the last century. Deeply spiritual and profoundly sensitive, his verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of self, country, creation, God, and love. This beautiful sampling of Tagore’s two most important works, The Gardener and Gitanjali, offers a glimpse into his spiritual vision that has inspired people around the world. Poems from The Gardener explore youth and earthly love, while excerpts from Gitanjali express divine love and Tagore’s difficulty in satisfying it. Overwhelmingly mystical and lovely in its simplicity, this unique collection offers insight into Tagore’s heavenly desires, his ongoing quest for Brahama Vihara, the joy eternal, and illuminates the remarkable diversity that made him the most important bridge between the spirituality of the East and West in the first half of the twentieth century.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis"In her enchanting collection of poems, Cynthia Buiza traces "the shape of memories, / the noise they make," with a delicate, uncompromising touch. Her calm, melodious lines push open the doors we tell ourselves we cannot open, doors to rooms that hold what we believe we cannot face - "mother, lover, loss." Distilled from years of longing and griefwork, of solitary walks and communal rituals, Buiza''s wisdom is sweet wine for bitter times."-Boris Dralyuk, poet, translator and Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles Review of Books"Cynthia Buiza''s poetry continues to witness, unceasingly, inviting us to join her in what I call as the last vigil to a passing world, where despite the odds and doubts, she continues to recollect the tracks and thoughts of our fugitive, fragile lives, now enshrined in a foreign tongue she has recoiled and reconciled as her own domicile, a second skin."-Kristian Sendon Cordero, poet and translator"What does poetry look like from the notebooks of a life thoughtfully walked? These pages reflect the maturity of consequence, filled by a migrant advocate, world citizen, and a spirit who has held poetry long enough to understand its torrents. Poetry, for those who stroll outside its white walls, is a "miracle at dawn." And there are many miracles in this debut collection - language as a "dance between mercy and grace" - so much thinking, so much survival, so much courage, from a poet who paves her journey by documenting the everyday vanishings and appearances."-Bino A. Realuyo, author of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door and co-founder of The Asian American Writers Workshop"Many worlds collide in the poetry of Cynthia Buiza, but what remains with the reader are the worlds of the new country vis-a-vis the old homeland. Silt and silk, stone and star, a vast country and an archipelago "with too many names for islands." People suffer and live in her poems; violence and hope commingle here. "She maps this line of desolation from one continent to another..." It is a poetry teeming with images moist and melancholy, "ghosts frozen in the dead eye of memory." The rough-grained world of the everyday and the slippery world of dreams are present, "surfacing in her dreams/ trailed by a lullaby of crickets nesting... in secret places." This is an assured debut for a poet whose wise and wonderful voice deserves to be heard, loud and clear."-Danton Remoto, author of Riverrun, A Novel, Winner of the National Achievement Award for Poetry, Writers'' Union of the Philippines

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exacting facsimile of Umbra protagonist Norman H. Pritchard’s long-rare 1971 collection of visually kinetic poetry American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page. EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard’s formal and conceptual sensibilities, and provides an entryway into the work of a poet whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition. DABA’s publication of EECCHHOOEESS is unabridged and closely reproduces the design of the original 1971 volume. Norman H. Pritchard (1939–96) was affiliated with the Umbra group, a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement. He taught writing at the New School for Social Research and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960–1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971). His work was anthologized in publications including The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies (1970), Ishmael Reed's 19 Necromancers from Now (1970), Text-Sound Texts (1980) and others.Trade ReviewThis recognition via fresh publication restores the author to his proper place in the avant-garde lineage that includes Concrete poetry, typewriting, and Visual Poetry. In addition to that important fact, having these books is an opportunity to experience the sheer pleasure of an elegantly venturesome mind at serious play. -- Albert Mobilio * Hyperallergic *Th[is] poetry collection exemplif[ies] the literary innovation of this era—a commitment to the pursuit and study of sound and a symbolic resistance to legibility. -- Erica N. Cardwell * Brooklyn Rail *

Read more less