Search results for ""omnidawn publishing""

The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections. In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry’s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit.

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A poetry collection that playfully questions the meanings of words. Walter Ancarrow’s collection Etymologies considers language as a process, rather than as a singular fixed history. These poems build imaginative worlds with a variety of creative word uses. They form a playful amalgamation of linguistic interpretations that flips and questions conventional narratives about word origins—including the idea that clear origins even exist. Throughout the collection, Ancarrow questions the intent of writers who use etymology in attempts to prove a specific meaning for any word. In so doing, Etymologies pays particular attention to relationships between the cultures and conflicts, the migrations and hegemonies, that create our words, and it considers how their meanings are furthered by us as we keep them alive through speech.Etymologies won Omnidawn’s 2021 Open Poetry Book Prize, selected by John Yau.

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The first installment in the Chamorro poet's series on the history, ecology, and mythology of Guam

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An immigrant's lyric narrative of humor, illicit revelation, insight, and desire

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A double book that echoes with the ecological and social crises of our times, this lyric meditation is interrogation and intervention, defying the limitations we place on story's potency and potential

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Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside opens with a foreword, an envoi laying out the concerns of the book. The book's rhythmic geography tracks a shadow epic with its 1400 Facts, aspects of feats, or anti-feats, events on the ground, but the hero/anti-hero is you & I & we and the narrative is splinters of stars.

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Aerial is concerned with the sky-its cloud-laden aspects in the first section, its dry realms of severe spirituality in the second. And as poetry is always about attention to language, the words cloud and clod-a shape of vapor and a shape of dirt-are key to this book's antithetical obsessions. But so, too, are words such as father, hunger, and edge. The implied narrative behind the poems has to do with family, but especially with loss of family members and how the connections they once formed live on for good or ill. The frail human community-always touching earth and touched by sky, by winds, weather, and words as if from God or the gods-lies behind every stanza. Ramke's early work in mathematics and his many years as a literary editor result in a diction and style which moves readily among scientific, religious, and literary discourse and discoveries. His desire to bring fact into the sharpest focus (remembering the connection between fact and manufacture) results in a tumbling sort

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A collection of Japanese poetry that makes unpredictable leaps of association to explore themes such as sex, loss, and memory. It features poems that appear in English on one page and in Japanese characters on the facing page, providing readers with a glimpse into Japanese language and culture.

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Sharing insight into many private forms of suffering - mental illness, loss of loved ones, family crises - this work uses personal issues to assess continued struggles with the profound questions of what it means to be human, moral and conscious.

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Describes a man late in life who has been around and who's thought about what he has seen and heard.

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Poems considering ever-present transformations and resisting destruction. This is a book about transformation. Moving across varied formal and aesthetic terrains, these poems take on the subject of change, considering the construction and demolition of buildings, roaming between cities, and drawing together an image of a world in flux. The speaker is in movement—walking, flying, swimming, and taking the train, while also constantly twisting in his sentences, turning into different versions of himself, and braiding his voice with others. These poems take on subjects that encompass creation and loss from Robert Moses’s career transforming the cityscape of New York to the robbery of works from Boston’s Gardner Museum. But, ultimately, these poems aim to resist destruction, to focus on the particular, and to hold still their world and their ever-shifting speaker.

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A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.

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Agnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her, her husband doesn’t understand her, and lately, she’s begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. While initially hoping only that the time there will help her give up stealing, Agnes soon learns that she can use objects to connect grieving children with the spirits of their parents. She must navigate the choice between using her compulsion for her own pleasure and helping the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and about the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss, to reach for the things we hope will restore us, and the risks we’re willing to take to ward off yearning—both in our material lives and social lives.Luminaries is the winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Novelette/Chapbook Prize, selected by Kellie Wells.

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With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and “show dogs with bejeweled collars” crowd into Win’s real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, haunt the book’s six sections. The nats, spirits believed to have the power to influence everyday lives, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father’s cigarette smoke. Assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon “a circle of drums and copper bells” to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This careful curation of unlikely objects and images becomes an act of ritual collection that uses language to interrogate how pain in life can transform someone into a nat or a siren that lives on. Restrained lines request our imagination as we move with the poet through haunted spaces and the objects that inhabit them.

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Within the visual arts of painting and photography, Martha Ronk finds an undeniable presence lurking: silence. This character slips into pauses, hides between images, and expertly evades the grasp of language. Ronk shows us that what is hidden just off screen in these images might just be the force that gives them power. The poems in Silences seek possibilities of how to form language from a phenomenon that so earnestly resists it. Rather than coax silence out of hiding, Ronk’s poems respond to its mysterious presence through questions and conjecture. These poems endeavor to give a much-deserved voice to silence, addressing the power of what is not seen. While silence remains perpetually out of reach, Ronk invites us to follow the language that creeps up to its edges. The poems in this collection form an inquiry that moves through the presence of silence and reveals insights into the character of the visual art in which it lives.

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Devonte, the eponymous subject of the poems in Devonte Travels the Sorry Route, has a gift: he can travel across space and time. This extraordinary quality brings Devonte into contact with a broad array of events and phenomena from black history and culture. Unlike most of us, who perceive of history as a sequence of fleeting events, Devonte is able to experience all of his diverse travels to varied historical epochs and places simultaneously, and in doing so is able to become a “stalker of history,” chasing down the elusive narratives that have been erased or ignored by the building of empires and the destruction of ecosystems. As fantastical as this account seems, in these poems, T.J. Anderson III captures a critical aspect of the ways identity is formed through community and collective memory, particularly among the peoples of the African diaspora. The way the words expand across the page enacts this polyvocal coalescing, and the blank space in between evokes the vast oceans that first separated and continue to resonate in the collective imagination of the Black community. At the same time that he relates the difficulty of crossing vast expanses of time and space to connect with our history, in these gripping poems Anderson proposes that the past is never far off—in fact, like Devonte, it lives in our own personalities and experiences today.

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Counter-conjurations that query whether poetry itself might be a violent entrance of language into the world

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An environmentalist military coming-of-age story askance of the real

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Selected by Calvin Bedient as winner of the Omnidawn Open

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The first US collection of the acclaimed British poet

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Selected by Kate Bernheimer as winner of the 2014 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Contest

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In Zach Savich's new collection, intent seeing makes the present more present. The mysteries of grief and joy, of daily desire and loss, resonate fleetingly, a bell struck delicately, struck again. In these poems, language is a sense like any other and yet is everything that may be glimpsed and heard and briefly known.

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Winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize

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A chapbook of epistolary and intimate memo poems

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Winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Prize

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The second volume from this acclaimed poet and film artist

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Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian's book is a compendium of night works-lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day's end some of the day's events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.

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A collection from celebrated poet Martha Ronk considering the relationship between person, body, and place. The Place One Is explores the intersection of person and place, the ways in which changes in the tangible world alter one’s vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern for—to take one example—the dwindling water supply in California. The body’s position, its geometry, and the topography of the surrounding land become less and less recognizable as body and world blend together. Gravel giving way underfoot mirrors the way that words dissolve into mumbles, and the skeleton of a rusty car on the sand appears like one’s own skeleton. Ronk shows that disintegration here is disintegration there. These poems also wonder at interdependence, considering how lines intersect and continue to connect us to the sea—and to islands, lagoons, greenery, sky, and space. In the first part of the collection, the poems focus on a rural landscape, and in the second part, they consider the overly bright urban world of Los Angeles.

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Lyrical, 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

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Winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest

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Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's desolation : souvenir began as a filling in of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarme's grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat. Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases cross at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full and no bees in the hive, no hive /

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Poems that follow systems of chance and divination to counter corrosive financial systems. Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems—or “black boxes”—based on black hexagrams in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, these poems cast their lenses on the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the “influencing machine,” Black Box Syndrome explores tensions between lyric excess and digital compaction in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.

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Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.

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Poems that break down, expose, and reconsider our notions of time. This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective time, with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. She considers how can we be both captured and complicit within systems of measurement, and she invites us to imagine how to break from, create, or become immune to them. Her poems use language to expose the face of the clock to reveal how gears press against interconnecting systems—economic, capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, and fantastical.

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A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.

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These 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.

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This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”

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This magical realist tale follows the travails of a burnt-out teacher from Queens who spends his time obsessing over the fact that he has been cheated out of living in his Grandma Rose’s Lower East Side apartment and is thus priced out of his “More Recent Ancestral Home” of Manhattan. In The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association, David Rothman weaves a rich story about real estate, family, and memory. Daniel, the protagonist, is haunted by the memories of his childhood experiences in his grandmother’s apartment, a home that he desperately wants to inhabit. One day he discovers a hidden relic on Rivington Street: a tenement reclamation office run by an eccentric centurion named Hannah. When Daniel inquires about the chances of reclaiming his grandmother’s old tenement, Hannah is not impressed. “Things don’t work like that, you rude, young schlub!” And so begins Daniel’s journey to take back his past and to secure an affordable space for his family in downtown Manhattan. This is a journey full of twists and turns, ups and downs, and an ending that would make even the most thick-skinned New York real estate agent shake.The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association is the winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Novelette Prize, selected by Meg Ellison.

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Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation and part prayer, re-imagining the form of the confessional poem by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. In This Red Metropolis What Remains, Leia Penina Wilson composes a mysteriously stark and playful pop-surreal romp through a mythic apocalypse. Dropping in and out of this mystic narrative are voices of characters who are trying to survive and to reconcile their own belonging. These poems reckon with what happens in the aftermath of brutality, questioning what anyone can or should do after tragedy, questioning everything until they begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape in the world of This Red Metropolis What Remains is itself deeply unsettled. Each form varies and reflects an endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. These poems ask what can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language and with an unbroken attention to the speaker’s own power. Creating shifting architecture and landscape that reveals both the disintegration of cultural time and the eternity of interior time, confession and lyric wrap both speaker and listener together.

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Attachments to proper names, traditions, and entrenched thought formations are a perennial problem and, as LM Rivera shows, an addiction. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that pervasive, and possibly eternal, compulsion. Rivera builds his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against simplistic, naive, sentimental, and played-out narratives, opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting-at-the-seams, experimental formations through which he thinks a concept through to its (im)possible end. On this philosophical-poetic journey, Rivera positions the grand figure of Martin Heidegger as a whipping boy who receives the punishment for the sins of blind tradition. Through this collection, Rivera attempts to sever many troubling yet lasting customs—be they overt, hidden, canonical, esoteric, forbidden, or blatantly authoritarian.

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The poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient’s fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us. First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.

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Helen of Troy and Aphrodite: two classical paragons of beauty and love. These two figures have served as the inspiration for innumerable works of art in the Western cannon. In the twenty-first century, however, what do their stories provide but a reminder of the predictable roles which sexism has assigned women throughout history and literature? In this fresh new take on the two women’s stories, Jennifer Pullen takes us away from the familiar and deeper into their experiences. Rewriting Homer, Pullen revitalizes these two figures for the contemporary era. In A Bead of Amber on Her Tongue, Aphrodite maintains autonomy through her experience of her own body, even when forced into marriage. Helen of Troy, meanwhile, harbors a love for her maid, Esme, that no conquering hero can vanquish. Revisiting these classic stories with an inventive twist, Pullen shows that, with a little imagination, the classics may yet bear new insights.

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Histories, stories, lyrics, aspirations, dreams, pressures, and images are spun into a musical tale through a site of convergence: the Black female body. Swarmed by external gazes and narratives, the inhabitant of this body uses her power to turn down this cacophony of noise and compose a symphonic space for herself. By breaching boundaries of racism, sexism, sizeism, colorism, and colonialism, these poems investigate the memories and realities of existing as Black in America. Building from poetic, journalistic, and musical histories, poet and essayist Kimberly Reyes constructs a complex and fantastic narrative in which she negotiates a path to claim her own power. These poems teem with life, a life rich with many selves and many histories that populate in the voice of Reyes’s poetic narrator. They sway between negotiations of hypervisibility and erasure, the inevitable and the chosen, and the perceived and the constructed. Reyes’s poems offer sharp observations and lyrical movement to guide us in a ballad of reconciliation and becoming.

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Poems that ask how perception turns into memory, and what is lost when this happens

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A series of prayers, laments, and lullabies addressing our current migration crises

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A poetry-essay meditation on the cultural and physical forces of the river

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A debut poetry collection that meditates on imagination and existence

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