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Book SynopsisEven in Germany, the scope and force of Bertolt Brecht’s poetry did not become apparent until long after his death and today, many of his more than 2,000 poems have never appeared in English. Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate his poetic legacy into English, positions Brecht not only as one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also as a fiercely creative twentieth-century poet, one of the best in German literature. With a foreword by his daughter; Love Poems features 78 astonishing and deeply personal love poems that reveal Brecht as lover and love poet whose struggle to keep faith, hope and love alive during desperate times represents the essence of human relationships.Trade Review"Not a title that would immediately spring to mind in relation to Brecht but, as these translations by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn show, Germany's most innovative dramatist was also a gifted lyrical poet, full of passion and insight..." -- Belfast Telegraph"What also surprises is the tenderness [Brecht] could convey...this book shows that there were many sides to him." -- The Herald

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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

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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

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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

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Book SynopsisAt times scorching, at times brimming with awe and desire, this debut book of poems resonates with a brilliant new voice.When Justine Chan worked as a park ranger at Zion National Park, she chose to retell a Southern Paiute folktale for her weekly evening program on coyotes. The more that long, hot summer unfolded, the more time she spent alone in the desert, the more she retold the story, the more the story became her life. And in that space, she began to write.Should You Lose All Reason(s) is unafraid of looking hard– back, down, towards, around, forward, at the stories we tell, at herself, at the desert, at the sun, at everything. In conversation with the Southern Paiute folktale, she weaves together a triptych of poems, poems both always on the move and stuck, in exile, in wilderness. Drawing from her experiences serving in AmeriCorps, working as a park ranger, and traveling across the United States, she explores race, loneliness, stories, hauntings, family, landscapes and cityscapes, climate change, survival, music, resilience, the West, and America itself.Trade ReviewJustine Chan's long poetic narrative, Should You Lose All Reason(s), embraces a search for belonging in an American landscape and in an American family with linguistic force, passion, and love. People talk about identity all the time, but Chan shows us how to occupy it and hold it in your heart.–Shawn Wong, author of American Knees Justine Chan's poems are epic-sized, much like the sweeping, cinematic landscapes she writes about. I'm always on the lookout for diverse, alternative experiences about "The West." Multi-storied and multidimensional, where myths come to life and people turn into stars, Chan's imaginarium is dazzling.–Tiffany Midge, author of The Woman Who Married a Bear Justine Chan's beautiful book, Should You Lose All Reason(s), howls with song, with nourishment, with "bright red bougainvillea spilling over fences." Through the power of Chan's anaphora, these poems echo across lush landscapes, with "ladders made of juniper trunks." Chan's lines ask us to wonder and wander, pulling us into visceral ecologies and mythologies that echo with parenthetical ache: "(Sometimes) I (still) can't shake it." As a fellow Asian American poet, I found this a collection that asks us to look, especially at ourselves – and with a tenderness that we are not often given.–Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City Justine Chan's debut collection is a mesmerizing tour of the vacancy and fullness across and between deserts and cities. A rapid and exciting lyrical chronicling, the book holds close questions on individualism and family, stasis and movement, flight and loss. It is a humble, acute call towards relationships and how each of us are always near to some and far from others.–Greg Bem, author of Of Spray and Mist Justine Chan's Should You Lose All Reason(s) is an aching and exhaustive elegy. The poems in this gripping debut seem to suggest if you can just name it, it won't be lost.–francine j. harris, author of Here is the Sweet Hand

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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.

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Book SynopsisJames Crews's three anthologies of contemporary poems celebrating hope, wonder, kindness, and connection packaged in a beautiful gift box set with the addition of four illustrated poem cards suitable for framing.  These are the poems our world needs now. Together, the three books include over 300 poems by a diverse selection of leading and emerging contemporary poets, including Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Jane Hirshfield, Tracy K. Smith, Julia Alvarez, Ellen Bass, Danusha Laméris, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, Joseph Bruchac, Nikita Gill, Linda Hogan, Mark Nepo, Alberto Ríos, and others. Special bonus feature: four frameable prints of poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Kimberly Blaeser, Paula Gordon Lepp, and a new poem by James Crews.

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Book SynopsisIn her ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet. From her own pet parrot, Henri, to the birds her husband attracts to their feeders, to the wildlife who live just outside—and regularly cross—her property on the wild edge of Salt Lake City, she uses her capacity for intense observation and meditation to think her way into other lives and possible shared futures, both good and bad.Trade Review"Ghost Apples... defies the authority of poetic tradition, especially that of the vaunted sonnet... Enjambment saturates the poems in this collection, which raises the question of what constitutes a unit of thought: the sentence, the line, or something else?" –Good River Review

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Book SynopsisThrough image-rich poems regarding migration, transcultural identity, loss, connection, dream, and aging—some translingual, some ekphrastic responses to ephemeral and surreal works of art—Brenda Cárdenas’ Trace explores conditions of displacement, liminality, and mutability. These poems transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us, traces we leave behind for others to encounter. Although elegy resurfaces throughout this collection as does a poetics of social consciousness, Cárdenas also embraces moments of levity, story, and an effervescent internal music that balance her steps through fraught yet bewitching terrain.Trade Review"I heard Brenda Cárdenas read from her new collection, Trace, at The Hungry Brain in Chicago: an incantation, a call to action. By the time I got to the book table, there were no more copies to purchase." —Susanna Lang, RHINO Poetry"[Cardenas'] latest book claims an expanded and expansive field of writers and artists (including Lucille Clifton, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, and Remedios Varo), in poems that go beyond the ekphrastic into the kinetic, the performative, the liminal space of dream and desire. Lines I can't get out of my head: "What can we do with this gathering of ghosts / but welcome them home." —Urayoán Noel, Intervenxions

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Book SynopsisA Plucked Zither explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam, and its aftermath. Crisscrossing between making a home in the U.S. and home in Vietnam, the speaker tries non-linear, multilingual voice(s) that demonstrates the disparate nature of memory and the operation of other ways of knowing. Efforts to speak reflect the severing created by historical forces of war and imperialism, while speaking makes connection possible and remains tied to that very history. Vuong leans on the anti-war Vietnamese singer and songwriter, Trịnh Công Sơn, for a poetic lineage on grief, longing, and justice. Rather than being sunken with loss, the speaker(s) move with it, leaping across gaps.Trade Review"In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong’s speaker processes and dwells on the migrant’s emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant’s birth land." — Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review"A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an "anti-map" of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants. Vuong's poems demonstrate how the shared experiences of the 1.5 and second generations of Vietnamese Americans continue to "make and remake" them—they are not so easily defined, whether by white America, their relatives, or in their personal turmoil to define their own relationship to Vietnam." —Cathy Duong, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network"Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong's title instrument: zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional." — Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation

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Book SynopsisIn her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist.These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson’s poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

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Book SynopsisIn Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, Jason Schneiderman confronts the rise of extremism and antisemitism in the United States while grappling with the end of his marriage and finding his feet as a newly single gay man.Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman’s signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman’s most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confro

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Book SynopsisWe takes an unapologetically spiritual stance in bridging politicized divides, exploring conscious and unconscious prejudices with lyricism, warmth, and self-implicating humor, how we are shaped by and create our nation by how we see ourselves and others. The poems investigate what unites us; how the personal is political, and the political is personal; changing our perceptions to heal families, friendships, and country of incivility and villainization by practicing greater compassion; trying to see past egos to souls, as We suggests in conversation with Whitman: I celebrate my being, every atom/of myself and you, lamp and mirror/of all that is; in a new Preamble to the Constitution; and in the feminist Peace Hymn for the Republic. We begins with a non-partisan vision of soul, and ends driving a rural road at dawn in State of the Union Aubade, both paeans to our common divinity.

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Book SynopsisEssential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other. In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert's spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds light having an edge over darkness. Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming's poems pay homage to every organism's joy to thrive, every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.

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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,&

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Book SynopsisAUTHOR OF 2024 INT'L LATINO BOOK AWARD HONORABLE MENTION, VOLCANIC INTERRUPTIONS CALIFORNIA ARTS COUNCIL RECOGNIZED ESTABLISHED ARTIST FOR CENTRAL CALIFORNIA REGIONThis poetry collection is heart-led, a feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.Odilia Galván Rodríguez Myths and loss, yearnings and magicCristina GarcíaThe poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author's journey into her Latine/x culture.The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro's Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

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Book SynopsisPoems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling. In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs. Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry. Trade Review"In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, Belk transfers the Bard's comment that 'All the world's a stage' from the theater's stage to the comic, violent, vulnerable, and wild ring of WrestleMania. This is a book of searching, tender, open, moments. Life is beautiful but not without its dangers. Belk knows this is true and does a fine job guiding us down the garden path." -- Matthew Dickman, author of Wonderland"To say that the bulk of these splendid poems is about pro wrestling is to say that Robert Frost wrote mainly about sound agricultural practices. When Belk says that seeing a gladiator’s spectacular move is like being kissed unexpectedly by someone you have a crush on, he reminds us how life and art and sport work: we script them to the degree we can, yet there’s always a surprise. No matter who we are, our dreams are what unite us, for everything we do is about 'coming together / & leaving,' about hoping 'to be known, to / be touched, to be less lonely than before.'" -- David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information"With the pageantry of professional wrestling as his lens and southern American boyhood as his vantage, Belk shows us 'something beautiful / made by a boy with all his heart' in his earnest, dazzling debut collection. The Gardens of Our Childhoods charts the slim line between masculine strength and vulnerability, asking us what it means for—and costs—this collection’s vast cast of characters to commit to tenderness in a world waiting to stomp on their backs and toss them out of the ring. After all, 'who would expect a large man born of noonsun & sinew to be delicate'? Belk powerfully summons legendary pro wrestlers, communes with their families, and invokes his own beloveds in a book that moves deftly between the spectacle of stage makeup and the quiet of newly planted irises: beauty performed and beauty deliberately tended to." -- Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi LettersTable of ContentsTable of ContentsTrash 1Perry Saturn makes ends meet after a failed tour with New Japan Pro-Wrestling 3The Death of Owen Hart 5Buff Bagwell’s Mother 6incantation [Fraxinus ornus] 7Perry Saturn fell in love with a mop 8The Cauliflower Alley Club 9Stasiak & Sammartino 10Stasiak & Sammartino II 11The Gardens of Our Childhoods 12Marcus Bagwell’s Mother 13letterlocking 17Angle of Regard 18a business without heart or conscience 20Hermeneutics 21bar trivia: good things have to happen to someone 22WrestleMania XVI & suicide 23Stone Cold Steve Austin’s Mother 24definition of the continental shelf 25The Undertaker’s American Badass Phase 26dead letter office 27bar trivia: no wrestler has ever used an Annie Lennox song as entry music 28Jimmy Snuka’s Mother 29John Cena’s Spinner Belt 30poem about a dying mall 31Perry Saturn at a bed-&-breakfast in Katonah, New York, before a January sunrise 32My love wants a chicken named Eleanor of Aquitaine 33Razor Ramon 34Blackjack Mulligan’s Mother 35The time Vince McMahon tore both his quadriceps while sliding angrily 37shipletters 38Madison Square 39Hacksaw Jim Duggan’s Mother 40The Fingerpoke of Doom 41one two skip a few a hundred 42bar trivia: Venice has been sinking for years 43Perry Saturn wonders 44Good Endings 45Ultimate Warrior’s Mother 46fanletters 48for once the best option is the easiest option 49The Mouth of the South 50Perry Saturn becomes the first wrestler to board the International Space Station 51at the top of this space elevator 54the young immortal plane 55Olive Saturn & the Third Plutonian Resettlement Operation 56The Fancy 58Acknowledgments 61Thanks 63

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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

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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

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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.

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Book SynopsisI Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a sophisticated and cerebral examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which. Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the name Penelope. “Nobody owns the meaning of these things,” Courtney Bush writes, but this does not stop the poet from seeking, from “reading meaning in the garbage” and in the flowers growing there. What does she seek? Not facts. Instead, something transcendent and mysterious, knowledges that can only be unlocked through experimentation with language, with art. In lieu of linear thought, Bush’s poems operate under unique logic systems that grow and branch like vines, driven not only by the urge to learn but also by the need for connection—between people, things, stories. Her speakers make cognitive leaps with youthful credulity, eager and open. “It comes down to a few things,” says one. “Vessels and bags / Every crude tool / Every day a friend to tell.” And another: “I want to tell you what a sword is. / To want to tell you has been my entire life.” They are explorers of the pathways between our outer and inner worlds, translators between what is and what could be. Bush’s reverence for the act of thought echoes that of a religious scholar gazing at the heavens. In order to learn, these poems suggest, we must believe the not-known is worth knowing. We must let belief hover around all parts of our lives, as a child does. “To have the idea of the secret chord is to have the secret chord,” Bush writes. To learn, we must make believe.Trade ReviewPraise for I Love Information“In Bush’s comfortably disjointed poems, surprise and pleasure are nearly constant, each line its own song. She saves profluence for clever pairings [. . .] Bush writes at the convergence of modernity and mysticism, turning her poems inside out”—Nick Ripratrazone, The Millions“A paradise of non sequiturs, I Love Information might contain ‘poems forked as a devil road,’ but each one proves a jump cut’s the quickest way to a ‘kind of heaven of facts without context, clean sources of light.’ A seeker who settles for nothing less than maximum amplitude, Courtney Bush heads ever toward ‘things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining,’ her poems a means to ‘entering sacred time recklessly,’ now with the gusto and bumptious charm of Christopher Smart, now with the sibylline intelligence of Rilke, and always with the antic candor of a digital native. Information at root means to give form to, and I too love the way these exciting, excitable poems give new form to the world I think I know by revealing the plurality of worlds quickly spinning within it.”—Brian Teare“I Love Information by Courtney Bush renders the bent and bendable logics of friendship, work, art, and love with startling wit and depth of feeling. I love the unpredictable angles of arrival Bush’s poems make shapes with, and the concise quality of their visual acuity. These poems include, adopt, memorialize, and let spread an expansive populace of voices and beings—they are totally open, and that openness establishes their ground. This is an amazing book.”—Anselm Berrigan, author of Something for Everybody “‘I do not want to be crazy / about the circle whose center is everywhere.’ So begins Courtney Bush’s I Love Information, a book of revelation—and of risk. Here is a poet who has entered the crucible of madness in her pursuit of ‘some internal logic strong enough to believe in’ and come back to tell us about the songs the angels sing in ‘the space between everything.’ Touching down in preschool classrooms in which the poet has taught, the Mississippi Gulf Coast of her childhood, and intimate vignettes of love and friendship along the way, these oracular, incantatory poems prove the world worthy of the quest.”—Jameson Fitzpatrick, author of Pricks in the TapestryTable of ContentsWhen You Get to Sparta Voice 1 Late Preamble 3Katelyn 4Katelyn 14Jubilate Agno 15 Katelyn 20 Katelyn 22 Katelyn 23Died SingingKatelyn 26Rilke Voice 28Poem After My First Revelation 35 Cassandra from Agamemnon Voice 37 My Son Is Home 39Penelope Voice 42 Katelyn 45Seraphim or Nothing 47 Baby Blue 57Katelyn 61Katelyn 63One-Day Winning Streak 64 Last Night Kyle 66Upstairs Bar 68Talking 712008 75I Love Information 77

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Book SynopsisIn a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.“I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,” Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question.” In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain forever”; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchanging”; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we’ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf’s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother’s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I’ve misshapen,” Keplinger writes.So is there “a point to all this singing”? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf’s head can’t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,” something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”Trade ReviewPraise for Ice"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history too) in an effort to understand modern life."—New York Times Book Review“Keplinger’s Ice travels across time and space, both evoking the history of life on earth and focusing on personal losses, [. . .] There is an arresting intimacy to the icy breadth of this collection, a sense of something unvisited before."—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub “David Keplinger’s Ice is Seamus Heaney’s North for the twenty-first century, which is to say that it knows history’s reverberating circle, how we learn about our contemporary selves from what, of itself, Earth chooses to exhume. From ice: a body. From ice: evidence, or parable, or prayer. With the precision of a clockmaker, Keplinger twists a key and reveals the body-memory of a lost mother’s eyeglasses, the story a child’s thumbprint tells in a tub of pomade, the “pure love that dug deep” and preserved, in ice, a wolf pup for 18,000 years. In these tender, wondrous poems, the poet excavates Earth’s frozen archives of Anthropocene violence, preserved in the body, to remind us of the heft and joy of living.”—Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal“Few books move me as wholly and profoundly as David Keplinger’s do. Aching and revelatory, Ice speaks to that part of us that wants to preserve our tenderness for this world and those in it. As the first poem considers the prehistoric wolf unearthed by the thaw of climate change, it asks ‘how the head got severed from the heart.’ As we turn the pages, the question invites us to examine our own history, our purpose, our legacy. The hurt, the poems reveal, is where we might come together to love the world and each other.”—Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure“David Keplinger’s eighth book of poetry, Ice, reveals once again how he keeps returning to beginner’s mind to refresh his vision and his voice. In ‘Two Horses in a Field,’ he asks, ‘Is it the speechless speech / that makes their being here / together, unembarrassed, embraced, fill me with happiness?’ followed by, ‘I want to love the world like this.’ These poems are acts of love that come from and return to the silence that has seen it all and embraced all of it. There is no greater love than that. As I finished the book, I found myself deeply at home in this poet’s company. I believe that many others will find the same.”—Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak“Keep watch for David Keplinger. His poems, with their exquisite immediacy and valor, confront us with what we need to see: our intimate part in the fate of our planet. Yet even in the anguish, we experience the beauty of it, and feel a kind of redemption in the truth-telling. You will want all your friends to read this book.”—Joanna Macy, author of Active HopePraise for Another City“Keplinger’s voices accumulate to a rich texture, inflected by literature and travel. I’ve rarely stood back in such awe at a collection’s ordering principles, its bone structure. These cities open their mouths and sing.”—Sandra Beasley“The exquisite poems in Another City possess the weight and certitude of stone, yet break within one as geodes: their depths prismatic yet dreamlike, enigmatic yet also deeply familiar. From familial histories to Lincoln’s imperfect embalming, Marie Curie’s radioactive notebook to an examination of the ache of quotidian objects, there is a wholly radiant center to this collection, a dazzling multiplicity of cities and citizens, losses and revelations. The domes of these pages—both funerary and celestial—are those in which the great poets sing.”—Katherine Larson“I cherish and am grateful for these poems, for the way the sweep of them disturbs me out of my complacency, and although I’m not certain as to who it is who tells me these poems, who sometimes even sings these poems out loud so I can hear them rise above the noisy hubbub of our lives, I know that he is capable of a powerful wrenching of the past into the painfully clear light of knowing, and I know that he, this speaker, presents—or illustrates, really—a frighteningly familiar record of someone confronting the essence of who he is in the world in the middle of his life without any reaching for self-praise or even salvation.”—Bruce Weigl“Within the places (somatic, textual, geographical) that house us and those that we house within us, David—frank, compressed, darkly witty, and never far from a sense of mythic wonder—makes clear that the purpose of a pilgrimage is to locate in any ‘city’ the profoundly humane citizenry of the isolato. ‘[D]eath is not the subject of our portrait. / It is,’ he writes in ‘The City of Birth,’ ‘the knowing you are seen, / it is the lighting of one’s light, it is to take / a body, knowing you are not the body. / That’s loneliness.’ In what Keplinger calls, in another poem, ‘our days of faithless translation,’ we are beyond lucky to have Keplinger interpreting our steps with ardent, articulate compassion.”—Lisa Russ Spaar“Like Joseph Cornell’s elegant and bewitching boxes, Keplinger’s poems are miniatures which reveal a universe. Although they begin in the quotidian, they are apt to end in revelation, made all the more resonant thanks to Keplinger’s exacting metaphors and unerring command of free verse craft. Yet he also reminds us, again and again, that revelation is by no means easy to come by. As he writes in one of the poems, ‘Now for the rest of your life / you are trying to be born / through a wound,’ a passage of Rilkean intensity which suggests that for Keplinger the stakes are very high indeed. Another City is his finest collection yet.”—David Wojahn Praise for David Keplinger’s Translation of The Art of Topiary“Keplinger’s translation seems to rise out of a love of language that’s almost mathematical in music and pace. Thus, each line is well made, composed of lyrical density and movement, and the reader experiences this—not as conceit, but as actual. Each poem feels alive with intention, teaching us how to listen to its music. Here control becomes part of meaning. The mechanics of nature—where the organic becomes metaphysical, or the natural sculpted—are primary to the collection. This masterful accretive affect works in The Art of Topiary. Jan Wagner’s vision has been exacted with care and know-how as Keplinger carries into translation the truth of a gesture, and this is where poetry resides.”—Yusef Komunyakaa Praise for The Most Natural Thing“Stunning and visceral . . . His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you’d think they wrote themselves into the world—that they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications.”—The Rumpus“Evocative and haunting, a meditation on memory and the body and desire. It is, for the most part, a very quiet book that relies less on big stunning moments than small details. . . . The fact that there is so much movement between the poems and across the book is remarkable.”—The Fiddleback“A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural.”—Triquarterly“Somehow this clever magical poet’s fervor brings to the page a splendor of humanism— the extension of wit, delight and cynicism. He’s at the top of the heap of the originals.”—Washington Independent Review of Books Praise for The Prayers of Others“The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger—a question The Prayers of Others answers with a resounding yes.”—American Book Review“The sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements.”—Antioch ReviewTable of ContentsI.Ice 3The Puppet Tiger That Masculinity Is 5Canto 6Almost 7Near Yakutia 9My Mother Remembers What Happened 10Rocker 11Irises 12Lemming of the Ice Age 13Ice Moons 14Sketch of Wings in Gorham’s Cave 16The Conger Ice Shelf Has Collapsed 18Spartak the Lion Cub Lives under the Permafrost 20Come and See 21Traveling 23At Osip Mandelstam’s Memorial Statue in Voronezh 24Two Horses in a Field 25The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is 26II.Chameleon 31The Future of Desire 32The North 34Mirror, on the Night of Your Passing 36American History in Místek 39What It Could Be Like . . . 40Adages for Dragons 41Elation 42Pomade 43Small Pink Reading Glasses 44Memory, a Snowfall 45My Mother Reading Dickinson at the End 47Erosion 49Possess 51American Thanksgiving in Místek 52The Oar 53The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog Surrender Is 57Driving through Kansas at Night 58 Emerson 59III.Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark 63Reading Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts 66Reading Gilgamesh before Going to Sleep 67Reading the Buffalo’s Face 68Reading Jake’s Poems at the Southernmost Point 69At the Museum of the Scalpel and the Ear Horn 70Assembling the Bones into the Body of the Saint 73At the Museum of Supernatural History 74Reading James Wright in Martins Ferry, Ohio 75Ghazal 77Reading Light 78A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz 80The Last Reader of the Poems 81The Long Answer 82Is 85Sonnet 87Notes 89Acknowledgments 91

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Book SynopsisSelected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother’s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness. Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry’s many dialects—to

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Book SynopsisA meditation on art’s longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.Jessica Fisher brings “the faraway close,” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each “day” is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time i

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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,

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Book SynopsisSmoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.Trade Review"Smoking Lovely, Willie Perdomo 's second volume of poetry, confirms his hard won place in American letters. Addiction, poverty, class and racial identity, love and recovery are examined with a devastating and streetwise voice, marked with irrefutable artistic integrity and craftsmanship. These poems sing, howl, and heal with a sad and searing wisdom akin to genius. Smoking Lovely is destined to become not just one of the best books of the year but of the decade." --Sapphire, author of Push "Willie Perdomo is an electric poet. His poems crackle with energy. The poet knows his beloved barrio, what to celebrate and what to condemn. He also has the courage to confront his own demons. There is raw pain in this voice, and much more: humor, irony, music, intelligence." --Martin Espada, author of City of Coughing "Willie Perdomo is a necessary and insistent voice in the current American literary scene." --Publishers Weekly "Smoking Lovely sings to both the eyes and ears, placing oral and visual patterns in dramatic tension with one another. And the pleasure offered by this vibrant collection is precisely the pleasure of watching and hearing the polyphonic performance in vibrant poetic terms. " --American Book Review Praise for The Crazy Bunch: "Set during one weekend in the early 1990s, Perdomo 's fourth book celebrates a crew of hip-hop-loving friends in East Harlem with his customary heart and bravura language." --New York Times Book Review

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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. Trade Review“H. Melt’s matter-of-fact, precise, cartographic poems perform necessary care work for the trans people and places they attend to and yearn toward. Deeply grounded in the plain, bountiful fact of trans worlds—and insisting on our worlds to come—this book offers all who need it a map to a world ‘forever in bloom.’”—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch“There Are Trans People Here is an ode to trans joy, resilience, and communal care. A trans-utopian manifesto for a world that ‘let[s] us be beautiful / on our own terms.’ Melt’s verse is bold, stark, and uncompromising. Threading elements of familial narrative, memoir, and queer history, they trace through-lines from our past to a brighter, queerer future.”—torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound From The Mouth Of A Wound“These poems meld individual resilience with collective resistance to illuminate the everyday beauty of trans lives in refusing the lure of conditional inclusion to instead challenge dominant institutions of oppression, demand structural change, and remake the world.”—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

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Book SynopsisThis comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relationships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”Trade Review“This historic volume powerfully captures the vital role revolutionary women played in shaping American radicalism during the Great Depression. It is a must-read for anyone interested in history, gender, and politics.” —Keisha N. Blain, author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America“This republication of Writing Red comes to us just as we are primed to think deeply about gender, race, and class in a moment that mirrors both the tragedy and creative awakening in the aftermath of the early twentieth century’s capitalist crisis. In the 1930s, in the 1980s, and again today, these women writers attend to our neglected realities and dreams. Hopefully, future generations will learn how not to forget them, and we will all benefit from their wisdom and perspective, moving forward toward the freedom of not just some but all.” —Gina Dent, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.“Thirty-five years ago, Nekola and Rabinowitz produced a labor of love, the path-breaking anthology, Writing Red. Indefatigable researchers, they discovered radical women writers whose work had gone missing from histories of the Thirties and histories of feminism. Theirs was not an academic exercise, but rather an effort to show that radical women of the Thirties, in their desire to tackle capitalism, racism and patriarchy, were there well before us. Now that historians are re-periodizing the women’s movement, suggesting the Thirties rather than the Sixties as its starting point, Writing Red is more essential than ever.” —Alice Echols, Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California“From Meridel Le Sueur’s fiction to Margaret Walker’s poetry, from legendary folk singer Aunt Molly Jackson’s lyrics to Tillie Olsen’s reportage from the West Coast Longshoreman’s Strike of 1934, Writing Red reignites the fires behind the battlelines of women’s struggles in the 1930s for a new generation of readers. Contemporary organizers and activists in abortion rights, trade unions, gender studies, sex work, and other sites of social action will find comrades-in-arms from a century ago in this magnificent volume by Nekola and Rabinowitz.” —Mark Nowak, author of Social Poetics“Writing Red is an indispensable record of the political struggles and intersectional solidarities of 1930s women radicals. With this updated edition, the revolutionary desires of the past are illuminated anew for the next generation of readers, writers, and activists. A testament to feminist collaboration, and a call to meet the challenges of the present, Writing Red is an enduring and necessary book.” —Sarah Ehlers, author of Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics“In Writing Red, Paula Rabinowitz and Charlotte Nekola introduce twenty-first century readers to remarkable writers from an extraordinary decade. Exquisitely readable and superbly informative, these collected voices bring to life women in fields and factories, kitchens, battlefields, and on the picket lines. By drawing attention to sexuality, domestic labor, motherhood, gender and racial oppression, these radical writers amplified the Left of their time. They remain a vital resource in ours.” —Rosemary Hennessy, author of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism“Writing Red is one of those rare books that transformed twentieth century literary history forever. This bold and brilliant anthology, curated with audacity by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, became the vanguard text of a new direction in the study of United States Literary Radicalism, one that upended the masculinist narrative of the Marxist-led cultural movement of the 1930s. Nearly four decades later, its unparalleled mission of reinvention continues to refresh and inspire scholars, activists, and readers.” —Alan Wald, author of Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left“This superb anthology offers the perfect introduction to the wide range of radical women writers in '30s America. And it documents a key moment in the evolution of the progressive movement in the US. A perfect book for any course touching on the Depression Era or the history of radicalism.” —T.V. Reed, author of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present“In this time of precarity, pandemic, and protest, we need more than ever to read those women writers of short fiction, poetry, and reportage that Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz first anthologized in 1987. Writing Red captures anger at exploitation and longing for a more just world: among both the left authors of the depression decade of 1930-1940 and its feminist editors of the 1980s, when women's studies as a field became institutionalized. We need these fighting words to counter the fascism and financial capitalism of our time.” —Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019“When it was first published in 1987, Writing Red exploded the leftist literary landscape by forcefully demonstrating how Depression-era women writers engaged carefully with gender, sexuality, class, and race in their radical work. Thanks to this timely republication of a classic anthology, an entirely new generation of readers and activists can grapple with the brilliant pieces it contains – even as they ask themselves why so many of the struggles found in this essential volume’s pages continue to feel eerily familiar. Populated with the energetic voices of women who imagined their fiction, poetry, and reportage as essentially connected to on-the-ground protest, Writing Red will inspire, challenge, and provoke all who peruse its pages.” —Aaron Lecklider, author of Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture“This volume excavates the stories, poems, and reportage of women writers whose work originally appeared in now-defunct Left journals. This essential collection should inspire.” ―Library Journal

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Book SynopsisThis poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America’s for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying to lift his family out of poverty, who struggles to maintain a sense of humanity while fighting to keep his loved ones close. According to NJ.com, “From institutionalized racism to addiction to the prison-industrial complex, this is a play about a great many large, pressing social challenges, but at its core it is a play about one family and its struggles to remain united as their world steadily crumbles. Impactful, warm, and unrelenting, this play that began as an experiment turns out to be an excellent examination of the human cost of a harsh and inhospitable world.” All profits from the book will go to a prison re-entry fund run by The Second Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey to help the playwrights secure housing and continue their schooling upon release.

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Book SynopsisInspired by the cleansing water often used in spiritual baths, Florida Water is an ode to the myriad ways a poem can rinse, reflect, reveal, and unravel us. An honest meditation on migrating to South Florida for love, connection, and community, these poems lay bare the challenging dance between the role of the artist, lover, and organizer. aja monet confronts the interpersonal truths of community organizing while also uncovering the state’s fraught history with racial prejudice, maroon communities, and natural disasters. This intimate collection of lyrical poems are the artifacts of her search for belonging and healing as she wades through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence.

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Book SynopsisA rigorous and defiant collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature. Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetic voice is sharp and irreverent—improvisational yet thoughtful, musical, and tender, achieving a range of lyrical registers woven seamlessly throughout the book from the first to last poem.Monson’s work challenges his readers with uncomfortable but essential, urgent, and necessary questions: What does it mean to be in the world and yet live apart from it? What happens to the minds and bodies of those locked away? What happens to the minds and bodies of their loved ones? How can America get free? Braiding personal narrative with contemporary rap lyrics and institutional language, Monson deepens the nuances and dimensions of and within Asian American poetics, prison poetics, and hip-hop poetics with his deft and experimental writing style. American Inmate speaks through cages, bars, walls, and borders, collapsing widespread misconceptions and stereotypes regarding incarceration, and shrinking the distance between readers on the outside and the complex interiority of an incarcerated human being. Sometimes slipping, sometimes soaring, sometimes laughing, sometimes dying, Monson’s fiery debut is a fresh, moving, elucidative work that will challenge readers to think more critically about the systems that govern our lives, to imagine with compassion and inclusivity, and to settle for nothing less than a truly free future that is liberatory for all.

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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

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