Poetry Books

Book Synopsis2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER 2020 FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDS SLINGSHOT questions the value of manhood, the price of sex, and the possibility of liberation. SLINGSHOT begins with the author ensconced in the menacing isolation of the pastoral, but once the work migrates to the City, monstrum grows form and fangs. In these messy, horny, desperate poems spun from dream logic, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of black sexual and gender deviance, as well as the emotional burden of being forced to the rim of society, then punished for what keeps you alive.Trade Review"The poems present themselves as homemade weapons."—Stephanie Burt, The New York Times "Contributions to crucial contemporary conversations ranging from blackness, transness, sex work, police violence, protest and neurodiversity."—Cat Fitzpatrick, Lambda Literary "A beautifully complex poetry collection, Johnson is defiantly sharp and humorous, with lines clearly from a technician. Themes include Black lives and organizing, disability, queerness, sex work, and societal devastation and care to name a few. If you want a book that flips formalism and confounds, SLINGSHOT is a stunning addition to your self-isolation reading life."—Kay Ulanday Barrett, them. "Johnson hits you like brick and awakens you to the revolution that could finally bring the phoenix from the burning embers of a society on the brink."—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine "Poems anchored in the mess of real-time violence and protest."—Bethany Mary, Vagabond City Lit "Rather than hold the reader’s hand and explain the complexities of the world they’re drawn from, these poems present themselves on their own terms and trust the reader to keep up. It is in this aspect that the poems point back to the title, in a way, each one a stone shot out to strike at the consciousness who hears it.—José Angel Araguz, The Friday Influence "Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s SLINGSHOT is my new favorite book. It is a masterpiece of immeasurable dimension. Within the book, there is incalculable beauty and horror, with poems ‘to coil you in fistulae of yarn and stars,’ the moon ‘maroon/ in the black latex of Pine Barren sky,’ scenes so painful and glorious they cut into your consciousness, with ‘[e]ach fluttering eye pink/ as Coney Island cotton candy. Scarlet/ as suede church shoes.’ Once in a lifetime, there are those books of poems with language so deeply exquisite that it pierces through you and circumvents both simple tradition and innovation. Instead these books make a more timeless lyric, both pre- and post- time, echoing the past and future simultaneously, into an endless present of pure force. In our lifetime, SLINGSHOT is that book. Read it now."—Dorothea Lasky “'Queer utopians think human beings are perfectible/ but we’re not, we’re just correctable.' So begins one poem in Cyree Jarelle Johnson’s so-good-I-want-to-quote-every-last-line debut collection. But these two lines contain the central explosion and, though they sound like a statement, the central question of SLINGSHOT—What happens after the admission, the recognition of the fact that not everything is salvageable, that some things must go? The answers are various, are voracious: sometimes, zines; sometimes, toe-sucking; sometimes, 'ominous petrichor'; sometimes, total exhaustion over the so-called allies who bring 'a big ass pot of raw beans and rice with a lonely fucking bay leaf'; sometimes, 'burn manhood / down in button up crop tops.' And sometimes, Chewbacca. Johnson’s language here is restlessly inventive while acknowledging how tiring it is to always, always invent, reinvent—and some things don’t deserve to be reinvented. 'Oh please,” one poem says about America, 'Oh please / let it burn down this time.'”—Chen Chen "Nothing short of magnificent, Johnson jailbreaks language to speak ambitious, rigorous lyrics of Black/trans/disabled/sex working story. At times I screamed out loud at the wonderousness of the work. Slingshot is the next generation of Black disabled genius poetics, and I'm in awe and grateful."—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha "Cyrée Jarelle Johnson writes us into a magnified intimacy, a textured devastation, a web that can be stretched, folded and replanted in a backroom, on the subway, and between lungs. SLINGSHOT establishes the conditions for its readability by entangling us in its refusals. Its density drags us across the riverbed of language with unforgiving and unapologetic force."—Raquel Salas Rivera

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Book SynopsisWINNER of the 39TH NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST for the 89TH CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY SHORTLISTED for the 2019 GOLDEN POPPY BOOK AWARD IN POETRY Conoley’s selected poems assemble a shockingly varied body of work, comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms. Her coruscating vibrant poems are informed by visual art and film, political engagement and playful linguistic constructions. Throughout, one can trace Conoley’s obsessions and concerns: democracy, metaphysics, motherhood, gender and race, futurity and history.Trade Review"Like a movie camera panning from one spot to another, Conoley’s early poems carry us into an oddly familiar world without ever landing in a well-known terrain, such as transcendent revelation. Starting out with poems set in Texas, where the poet grew up, Conoley moves—literally and figuratively—into a wider, deeper world."—John Yau, Hyperallergic "Over the course of her career, Conoley’s style has developed from lyric poems recounting a Texas girlhood, to fragmented sequences that play with language and perspective, to roving, cinematic poems that address history, art, biography, and language. Winner of the 2017 Shelley Memorial Award, Conoley makes this transformation visible in these selections, which the poet has organized into sequential, thematic sections independent of her seven collections, introducing unfamiliar readers to her aesthetic preoccupations and concerns."—Publishers Weekly"Gillian Conoley's oeuvre celebrates an animated sense of multiple engagements not unlike the art of cinema."—Elena Karina Byrne, Full Stop "Conoley foregrounds the immediacy of our experience of language, its materiality, through the silence, rupture, and elision that she invites into her poetry. As the book unfolds, we witness Conoley, like the speaker of 'Native,' 'taking the meaning / and giving back the meaning / as the photographs do with the life.'"—Kristina Marie Darling, LARB "This work is the warmth of the sun inside us at night, the crushing duty of life support. Living in our world is like opening a door to see light at the end of a tunnel, but forging ahead blindly and finding peace in shadows."—Bethany Mary, Vagabond City Lit "To read Gillian Conoley’s poems is to enter the world of the uncanny; it looks and feels like our world, but something is a bit unsettling. And perhaps that’s what our world really is, only we are unaware of it until her lines bring the darkly lit, cinematic, revelatory scenes to the fore."—Tracy Zeman, Colorado Review "The collection I’ve returned to most this year is Gillian Conoley‘s A Little More Red Sun on the Human (Nightboat Books). It’s a nearly-300-page compilation of Conoley’s restless, often enigmatic poems, and it demonstrates—to me anyway—why she’s one of America’s most singular voices."—Jeremy Lybarger, The Poetry Foundation "Through Conoley’s poems, we are reminded that, while we may often feel like the rulers of our universe, there will be days when we do not, and we must embrace the playfulness that arises when we aren’t so busy keeping track of time. The poet’s duality between frolic and wit shows us that we stifle ourselves when we constantly try to control what we feel, perceive, and expect in life. Through their inventive retrospection, Conoleys’ poems create new universals for our secular world."—Gabriel Weiss, ZYZZYVA "Wide-ranging stylistically & tonally, from tight early lyrics, to a more ‘experimental’ fragmented middle period to the sprawling, yet precise new [de]compositions that transcend the distinction between lyric and narrative, there’s yet a consistency of vision, elegant freedom…throughout."—Chris Stroffolino, Entropy "This epic 320-page-plus collection is a necessary addition to your poetry library. In it, language feels as if it has been reinvented in order to speak the truth of this new age where the pillars of thought we once relied on: history, religion and memory, are at once questioned and reexamined and where the natural world still rises like a phoenix from the havoc we’ve made."—Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Poetry Flash "There are many innovative poets writing now, as Conoley does, freed in varying degrees from continuous discourse, description, argument, etc., but very few of them deliver her sensual impact, cogency, her vivid language, her downright human importance: among today’s innovators she flies virtually soul-o. Poem after poem, there’s intuitive rightness to her words that yields something of the wonder of flocks of birds, schools of fish, veering in their mysterious unisons. Across her career, too, her subjects range widely, from the ambience of her small-town Texas youth, through astronomy, Einsteinian physics, Gandhi, the politics of peace, love poems, and more, all seen in their various lights, sumptuously imagined. Her approach in editing this new and selected, as she explains in a preliminary 'Author’s Note,' is to alter these poems’ original order, so that, while they appear in roughly the same time line, they’re combined differently in newly titled sections to read as a new book. It’s a big book, indeed, of almost fearsome drive and sustained creativity.”—Northern California Book Awards Committee "Conoley’s poems have a singular energy like an organ solo or a shotgun resorting to storytelling. She adds tool handles to our histories; a set list for our waking souls. And an instrument of self-reflection that a landscape might ponder itself with. On her page, our natures get away with nothing. All cradled by a ruthlessly loving dance of language; in her poems we meet our twins."—Tongo Eisen-Martin "Masterfully composed in the hot spaces and so rhythmic sounds Americans have put to their times. ‘Like gold into scar/a twister in the skull.'"—Alice Notley "Nimble, inquisitive and intelligently elegant, the poems in this much anticipated volume reorient phenomena to make meaning with it: personal, inviting, knowing, and necessary. The range of Gillian Conoley’s poetic attention is a marvel."—Hoa Nguyen "Are we allowed to enjoy poetry this much? These poems are so pleasurable it’s nearly felonious. Their narratives point to both the ordinary and the deepest dream-real in the saturated colors of fairy tales. They remind me to watch the way a mail carrier walks or what it feels like to be lost in language’s musical woods—meaning, they are alive to life, and that living is infectious. 'Do you feel a light in the sun/on your back, piercing through the water, it’s a light—said the said the I.' Bask in that."—Eleni Sikelianos

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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

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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

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Book SynopsisFINALIST for the 2022 California Book Awards in Poetry!FINALIST for the 2022 Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry!"Permanent Volta is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses."—VogueA debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and ask how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and strugglePermanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures. Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg’s birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective. Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.Trade Review"Permanent Volta is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care."—Vogue"Stockton presents ceaselessly fluxing potentials for eros, care, and language. Attentive to the mundane details that make life—and creating art from within the proletariat grind—so challenging, Stockton mercifully shares a rich and resourceful view of love’s future."—BOMB"Rosie Stockton’s Permanent Volta is a heady and playful debut marked by apostrophes, commands, shrugged epiphanies, rhetorical questioning, and an earnestness that all operate in a shrouded didactic mode… In poem after poem, Stockton explores a bittersweet reckoning with repetition compulsion or rather, tries to understand what it means when we miss the feeling of the “brink” more than the person whose departure creates it."—Starred Review in The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books"Stockton would never proclaim that they have the blueprint we need to build this future. Rather, their work reminds us that we must learn how the systems that produce us function and how we are complicit in them. Only then can we destroy them. Stockton reminds us, too, that our resistance and pleasure both insist on welcoming change on an oceanic scale."—LARB"Rosie’s poems are a treasure chest of poetic forms, with language both proper and rowdy. They’re an Edna St. Vincent Millay of our Gender-Fluid generation."—The Believer"I invite you, dear reader, to dream with Stockton on the pages of Permanent Volta, if only to 'hear the things/we cannot see,' in an effort to transform all our relations, so that 'together we made/this place/together/we can leave it.'"—Full Stop"And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them."—Lambda Literary"A paean to the disruptive power of queer desire, Rosie Stockton’s rhapsodic debut, Permanent Volta, embodies a poetics of the swerve, of switch life beyond butch and femme, where we inhabit, kaleidoscopically, the pleasure-pains of Eros’s excesses. We are hailed, are beckoned by, Stockton’s visionary imperatives: “it’s time / for love / in the time / of dollar store cutlery.” We torque to find a way to love under late-capitalism, awash in the luxurious bliss of Permanent Volta, with Stockton as our humble guide."—Jackie Wang "Brainy, bratty, witty, libidinal, vulnerable, this book is a “bad sub,” a queer comrade you can trust to show up on the front lines of resistance."—Brian Teare "A fresh take on contemporary subjectivity and gender ("deep in my reliquary it rots like gender"), Permanent Volta is necessary reading for those of us who aim to re-invent the future."—Dawn Lundy Martin "These poems rise, softly recede and then spill forth—like a body of water, like a ‘spilt glass of wine’, like desire itself. In this collection, an addicting world of eroticism and fantasy is carefully constructed, while the speaker remains firmly rooted in the reality of materiality, grasping with its bleakness, while finding escape and beauty wherever is possible. Inherently radical, these delicate poems will shatter you in the most pleasurable way."—Rachel Rabbit White

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Book SynopsisA collection of lyric meditations cultivated from a deeply personal experience of the natural world, synthesizing the poet’s experiences of the elemental and ephemeral; presence and place. In Of Mineral, Tiff Dressen initiates a chemical reaction, taking place on the page so meaning is continually created and destroyed. The forces at play create a beautiful and unpredictable stability. With intentionality and deep attention, the poet undergoes an elemental education, learning through articulation how to experience the natural world as an active participant rather than as an observer. As the poet attempts to synchronize their left and right brain, boundaries between the urban and the “wild” dissolve to form a more unified experience of presence.Trade Review"The contemplative second book from Dressen uses spare language to describe the natural world in lines that often spread across the page. Dressen also draws from music and mathematics, citing the works of Bach and Alan Turing in the same poem to explore the spectrum of human ingenuity."—Publishers Weekly"Like the best poetry, these works contain great specificity while leaving ample room for one to make their own connections to the text. After multiple readings, this collection calls the reader back for one more dive into its rich content and energetic form."—Jessica Wickens, The Rumpus“As I explored this book, I felt as if my bones and veins were expanding, reaching back to older parts of themselves, the calcium and iron. Tiff Dressen's words walk, carry, observe and choose. They enter into in order to know.”—Francesca Preston, RHINO Poetry“In this collection, the self-described flâneur takes the reader on a literary journey through the streets of the Bay Area, the paths of history, and the neural networks of their own mind. Like the poet themself, Of Mineral has many layers to discover.”—Della Watson, Full Stop“There is an intimacy and an urgency to Dressen’s lyrics, as lines and fragments meander across the landscape and days. Dressen’s extended lyrics find their roots in the slant language of their immediate world, and amid the examples of foundational poets.”—rob mclennan's blog“Tiff Dressen’s poems are bold acts of accumulation and dispersal. The result makes for hybrids and synergies and possibly even ‘a new structure for love.’ The readiness to attend is everywhere—these texts are stays against forgetfulness, and a summons to maintain the exquisite tensions of a lifeworld in which ‘we are all responders.’”—George Albon“Tiff Dressen sets type, and these poems feel like they have been laid down on the page by such a person: with physical precision, silence and serif equally weighted. These are such lyrics that live in a physical world: that know the difference between branch and bird-bone, the qualities of each that permits balance. The collection of them together feels as intentional as construction inside a Cornell Box, as evocative as an early Mondrian.”—Kazim Ali“Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral engages city life as it unfolds in an ever changing landscape of flora and human connection utilizing navigation and inquiry to thread the labyrinth, ‘we were denied the original / forest that grew here.’ ‘How do I / create the distance / you need / to reach across.’ Dressen’s compact collection provokes existential thought while acting as a guide to recognize what is possible—’Because you said the sky / is a kind of ocean / we learned the alchemy / of air / we became many.’ Take this book with you on a hike. Read it on a hilltop.”—Sunnylyn Thibodeaux“While Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral certainly vibrates with concision and crystalline sharpness, the minerality of their book also pulses animal—skeletal structure and blood pumping warmth, vulnerability, refusal, and all sorts of gorgeous entanglement. An embodied exploration of place and how the city calls us into being and intimate relation: ‘How do I/ create the distance/ you need/ to reach across?’ Dressen has made a world amongst these pages that is both the world we share daily and somewhere else entirely; a visit there will transform your own inhabitance in beautiful and unexpected ways.”—Megan Kaminski

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Book SynopsisWINNER of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureFinalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry! A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.Trade Review"This refreshing debut gathers its power by exploring the overlaps between gender, sex, language, and nationality. [...] Daring and original, Chan’s poetry collapses categories to create inspired art."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"Wo Chan’s remarkable debut collection puts in tension memories of the diaspora as the poems move between childhood, the family restaurant, and a racist immigration system that demands exceptionality and authenticity."—Orchid Tierney, Jacket2"Togetherness is a poetry collection I recommend to all who love poetry or memoir—or both. Its narrative thread follows the search for love and acceptance, both from outside and from within, and it offers a refreshing and deeply intimate experience from those not often given a voice."—Bella Dalton, International Examiner"At the red-hot, glittering core of Wo Chan’s explosive debut Togetherness is the intersection of the foul and the forlorn. [...] Togetherness is not a study of restraint, but a joyous, unruly recreation of life’s big and small (melo)dramas."—Madeleine Poole, storySouth"Togetherness is a restless collection, brimming with forms new and old, some prose-y and others firmly poetic, and all eclectic. Most of all, it’s a searching debut by a poetic voice that is as many parts scatological as it is experimental; as saucy as it is ebullient and sincere, as elided as it is overflowing."—Sarah Sukardi, Soapberry Review"There’s much to talk about in Wo Chan’s work, much to love, and much to look forward to in future poems that are yet to be written by this beautiful poet. Togetherness is word art, a gift given to us by a very generous poet."—Judy Ireland, South Florida Poetry Journal"This is a vibrant, critical and loving collection, one that startles through both the strength and vulnerabilities displayed throughout Chan’s glorious, tender and occasionally wild performance."—rob mclennan"A glamor clown for love and art, diaspora and desire, Wo Chan's brave exuberance, their mercurial surfaces and depths both, line for line seem to say, 'What is a heart for if you can't put sequins on it, or glue gun it to your sleeve, or wipe your nose?' Wo Chan's poetry and performances have sustained me for years, a favorite source of pleasure, solace, disruption, accountability, community—for years I have wanted this book and here it is now, the poems have gathered for their sublime cabaret. Nothing I could say would prepare you, except maybe an invitation: pick up this bright masterpiece, it is your turn to experience this love."—Alexander Chee"Every poem is a mouthful of meat, music and memory. These poems are vulnerable and resilient, fluid and focused. A versatile and verbal poetics—an inimitable Wo Channess anchors these narratives of personal, cultural, and sexual survival. It is possible to live (on poetry) in a country that tries to kill you. The evidence is in every Wo Chan poem."—Terrance A. Hayes"It’s no easy feat to tell the truth, nakedly (or at least in a rhinestoned nude illusion)...and Wo does it with so much style, humor, and emotion that it always breaks your heart (and heals it all over again.) Get ready to sob, laugh hysterically, nod knowingly, stop in your tracks and go back and reread it from the start! Give it up for the unparalleled gift that is Wo Chan!"—Sasha Velour"Wo Chan’s debut hurtles past any praise I can heap on it. Acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation-state and of the exhilarating splendor of drag, Chan’s language—razor sharp, captivating—refuses to demure, to clarify. A wide range of formal approaches and a structure that’s sheer genius troubles assumptions, disrupts notions of 'togetherness.' I will be teaching this book."—Eduardo C. Corral"This is a poet unafraid to tackle the tacky and the tasty; the gutter and glitter—those grand parallels of a life made for or and on the margins. In linguistic loop de loops—some delightful, others terrifying—Wo Chan perceives an America we can now easily recognize from a poet who suffers the wounds, but wants them healed."—Patricia Spears Jones

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Book SynopsisA long awaited collection of poems by Mark Hyatt, one of the great lost writers of mid-century British poetry. Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work ­survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry—“hot and tender,” funny and sad—tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.Trade Review"Hyatt suggests that sexuality of any kind is a longing for relation and a way of knowing the self. But so is writing, so is poetry, and so is any kind of social activity. For Hyatt, queer sexuality is a given, not, to adopt the language of the day, a 'social problem.' And in the bohemian enclaves of early 1960s London, he found a context in which his queerness—which along with his race and class sometimes rendered him precarious—could be nurtured and protected."—David Grundy, Harriet Books“You can tell Hyatt can dance from the length of his lines. You can also feel the courtesy he extends to words in that he gives each one its space. He moves you. He has a touch of San Francisco in his grammatical manner. But he is not American, he’s an original."—Fanny Howe“Reading the poems of the once lost and now thrillingly rediscovered Mark Hyatt, I’ve found a poet of moving conundrum, of brutality and tenderness, who can see a lover as both ‘my ruin and within me the life,’ who knows the dilemma of being a poet while believing that ‘the dearest of what you remember/must never be spoken even to tree boughs.’ Hyatt left a music I can’t stop hearing now, gratefully.”—Carl Phillips"A selection of Mark Hyatt’s poetry has been lovingly gathered together by editors Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, and the astounding claritas and candour of the lyrics have a bold range across the plainstyle spectrum. . . . Extraordinary, visionary, wildly clever, words can’t quite cover what these ‘infinite stunning’ poems do with their meanings, across such a bewildering range." —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold“‘Here’s to the high explosive death bird | That troubles the vegetation on language’ and about time too. At last this generous selection of Mark Hyatt’s work will broadcast his full power to those who are able to take it. And Hyatt’s poems are filthily sexy. If you revel in indeterminacy, up yours! – prepare for a loving punch in the gut.”—John Wilkinson"Can't get the poems off my skin, like ink or mud or raw biscuit dough. I don't understand all of Mark Hyatt's poetry; I don't understand all of Emily Dickinson's either. They both wrote from unspoken interior personal experience that underpins everything in our culture. Don’t miss these poems. I resisted, at first, until his words and life story tore my heart open and moved in; now nothing will get him out."—Judy Grahn"So Much For Life is the most extensive collection to date of the late Mark Hyatt’s flagrantly embodied, daringly vernacular poetry. . . [a] feverish, persistent voice."—Oluwaseun Olayiwola, TLS"It seems like some kind of miracle that Nightboat Books has published a two-hundred page collection [of Hyatt’s poetry], along with Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts’s illuminating introduction, comprehensive bibliography and painstakingly detailed set of editorial notes. . . However deep the despair in this collection, Mark Hyatt finds ways to affirm, celebrate and wonder." —Ian Seed, PN Review "2023 has been the year of Mark Hyatt: the posthumous publication of Love, Leda (Peninsula) and So Much for Life (eds. Sam Larkin & Luke Roberts, Nightboat) have changed UK and queer literature forever." —So Mayer, Lunate"[Hyatt's] story is incredible, his poetry – standing aside from his biography, but as ever and not, informed by it – is so contemporary, so hilarious, so stark, it is hard to believe he was writing in the 60s. . . I could quote him endlessly, and I am grateful to the editors for bringing these poems properly into print." —Rachael Allen, Granta

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Book SynopsisIn WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making.  In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnighta churchy holiday of messianic tarryingand steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacementfrom countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.

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Book SynopsisOthello is one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other previous edition of this play has.In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama, and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

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Book SynopsisSet in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect that appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality. As the second title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book revisits this ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.

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Book SynopsisSet on a remote island, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an ideal subject for artist Rose Wylie, whose work frequently references classic stories and well-known characters. Likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, The Tempest brings together various themes the bard explored in his prior plays, including magic, revenge and forgiveness, order and society, and nature versus art. The shipwreck and remote island, the spirits, and the dukes and their children, offer rich material for Wylie’s works on paper and canvas. As the third title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book pairs a complex narrative with equally layered works by a contemporary artist who approaches the play and art-making from a unique perspective.

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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

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Book SynopsisA book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation" which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order—The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.Trade Review"In her debut, Terazawa, daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, considers the colonial and linguistic legacy of the Vietnam war in a work comprising imagined testimonies in verse." —Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly "What language can we use to describe atrocities mounting on top of atrocities? How do we organize the telling? What happens after? In Sophia Terazawa’s stunning and necessary debut collection of poetry, we begin with the letter A, we begin in Vietnam. We climb a hill. On our journey we encounter different systems and schema for representing the moment of slaughter' (the affidavit, the cross examination, the grease work and its diagrams, the Pleiades, the Q and A). But we do not progress as much as watch events disperse like light through a prism. 'Therefore, we direct that length of earth through weed then bone, using this meter of our killers…' writes Terazawa. 'Yes, we thus decompose to open gaps for breath…' Terazawa splinters, she reconstitutes, we witness the burn, the rise. There’s a limit to what can happen in a colonial language. In Winter Phoenix, Terazawa takes us beyond it" —Susan Briante "I envy you, who are about to experience Sophia Terazawa’s Winter Phoenix, for the jagged, life-harrowing testimony / the searing counter-autopsy performed on the overspreading shadows of human extremity / and the enforced contortions and yet finally free revelations of language / that are about to incite and irrevocably transform your mind and especially your heart. Terazawa’s poetry—trial, exhibition, demonstration, transfiguration, ballad of descendant unquiet—is the hardest won form of love. It is poetry as refoliation." —Brandon Shimoda "Violence looks back, tries to find quiet in its wake, but quiet chooses instead to slip away to a place Elias Khoury called Little Mountain. Toni Morrison took us to the clearing. Paul Celan followed ashes into the sky. Like them, Sophia Terazawa leans closer to the page, to its ink, deeper into the chest and throat, closer to the edges of her fingertips, so she can lift quiet into the imagination and thereby inaugurate a courtroom for reckoning, a chamber for transformation, a hill for a tattered flag, and a hill again, to run down, arms open, holding out an amulet of love."—Farid Matuk "Sophia Terazawa’s profound debut collection Winter Phoenix invites us to seek out radical healing rituals as a means to persevere amidst the horrors of empire during the Vietnam War. Beneath its testimonies, exhibits, cross-examinations, and diagrams of war crime tribunals is the incantation of voices that can no longer remain unheard. The poet honors these voices that span 'between documents and justice,' along with the ancestral and astral, toward greater possibilities of repair. By conjuring an inquiry of these crimes, by subverting language of the empire, and by seeking new accountability, the reader is compelled to not look away but then to ask: where does complicity end and healing begin? This collection guides us to listen deeper and encourages us to consider who speaks and is allowed to speak, who jurors the justice and receives the justice, who can and cannot answer the questions to make us whole. In its refusal to 'Learn to / spēk / just how this / ˈkəntrē / speaks,' we are pushed further so that within these pages transformation becomes all the more possible."—Anthony Cody "With Winter Phoenix, Sophia Terazawa conducts a symphony of voices, documents, and archives in the form of lyric testimonies which bring to mind precedent texts such as Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, Layli Long Soldier's Whereas, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Incisive and microscopic, Terazawa examines the intimacies of the unnamed speaker's matrilineal line while cross-examining those who were complicit in war crimes during the Resistance War Against America, or American War, or the 'Vietnam War' (as it is referred to outside of Vietnam). Lush ecological textures and '[h]ills of lemongrass and eucalyptus' juxtapose against lyric redactions and source materials: 'Well, I've shot deer and I've gutted deer. It was just like when you stick a deer with a knife--sort of a thud--or something like this, sir,' culminating in searing treatise against and indictment of war. Terazawa is exacting in her visions of the personal and trans-national past. 'These facts are very simple,' she writes, and she's absolutely right--but the aftermath, the legacy--is far from it."—Diana Khoi Nguyen

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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

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE 2021 WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS—ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS POEMS IN TRANSLATION CONTEST No Gods Live Here, the first book-length collection by a woman from São Tomé to appear in English, is grounded in the lush islands'' history of slavery, colonialism, and independence. A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country''s past alongside the poet''s own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation''s distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place. Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in PoetryBefore his tragic death, Szilárd Borbély had gained a name as one of Europe''s most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet—one of his major works—evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Erno Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.

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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.

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Book SynopsisA 21st century re-imagining of the Canterbury Tales, set on a vacation cruise in the midst of the pandemic, a wonderful story for our time Hoping for an adventure (at a discounted price), two dozen strangers set sail to balmy St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. As different from one another as strangers can be, they agree to pass the time by telling stories, entertaining one another. As the stories are shared, everyone learns more about their neighbors and starts to bond. Partway though the voyage, however, they are notified about a virus that has spread across the United States and their destination. Their ship is quarantined and they are destined to loll on the waves of the open sea until a port welcomes them. Stuck together in the confines of the ship, they continue regaling each other with more tales. A Journey to St. Thomas is modern re-imagining of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Josiah Hatch, who studied Anglo Saxon and Middle English languages at Oxford University, uses iambic pentameter and craftily updates Chaucer’s characters to those on the present-day cruise liner.

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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.

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Book SynopsisSKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer’s identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again?Trade Review"A sensuous evening filled with the promise of mutability, an existence without the restraints of what our skin color binds us to.""A buoyant experimental cabaret of Black womanhood." * Vulture *

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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

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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 *

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