Search results for ""Nightboat Books""

A response to the unimaginable cruelties that became our new quotidian in 2020, that moves musically and discursively through innovative permutations of lyric form.CRUEL/CRUEL is the manifestation of a Black, queer voice grappling with the intricacies of (un)belonging and identity. These poems use genres of queerness and race to reckon with the pervasive power of oppressive institutions, shaped by art and a soundtrack of Black musical traditions of resistance: from jazz to soul to experimental to hip hop. A hybrid visual and literary object, CRUEL/CRUEL feels relentlessly present, and yet emphasizes the archival and documentary as intrinsic to our personal and collective survivals.

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Named a must read book of 2023 by Nylon, BookRiot, Vulture‎, The Millions, and Ms. Magazine!A baroque work of intimate myth exploring one woman’s interdimensional search for beauty and embodiment, through kaleidoscopic renderings of hospital corridors, brutal breakups, and passionate romance.The Fifth Wound is a phantasmagorical roman à clef about passion as a way of life. In one dimension, this is a love story—Aurora & Ezekiel—a separation and a reunion. In another, we witness a tale of multiple traumatic encounters with transphobic violence. And on yet another plane, a story of ecstatic visionary experience swirls, shatters, and sparkles. Featuring time travel, medieval nuns, knifings, and t4t romance, The Fifth Wound indulges the blur between fantasy and reality. Its winding sentences open like portals, inviting the reader into the intimacy of embodiment—both its pain and its pleasures.

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Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender PoetrySonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism in Kamden Hilliard’s debut collection of poems, MissSettl. In MissSettl, is a funny, joyful, and spiteful debut collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with impish provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism and gender, and race, and money, and property. MissSettl confronts what’s in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.

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A reissue of Michael Palemer’s poetry notebook first published in 1999 and now considered a classic of the genre of poet’s prose. In The Danish Notebook Michael Palmer sets out to discover which images and designs will appear when his reflections (on poetry, collaboration, work, travel) and memories (of chance meetings, conversations among friends, books read and movies seen) are set down on paper. The result is part memoir, part correspondence, travel diary, and poetic essay. Moving from the streets of Paris and San Francisco to the top of a Hawaiian volcano, it reveals a rare, personal look at one of the most original and influential poets of our time.

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A guided meditation on human extinction that imagines a post-apocalyptic Earth thriving without us. Adopting the role of a death doula or New Age religious leader, and drawing inspiration from the Theater of the Absurd, author Yearous-Algozin prompts readers to accept the already occurring end time. A Feeling Called Heaven oscillates between grief and humor as it imagines the nonhuman world that will grow from the ruins of this one, cultivating a sense of presence and intimacy with the inevitable destruction of our global environment.

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Winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award!Winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award!Finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards in Poetry!Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States. Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

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Through a series of transmissions and proposals, the poems in No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body explore the intelligence of the body, especially bodies under duress. Wadud evokes the hum and chorus that fills us when we write to explore methods and modes of circulation, continuum, and claustrophobia. Drawing from the performance practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Wadud asks, how does a thread of logic form? How do we extend the thread on either end so we see the lineage and continuum of our thoughts?

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In Emporium, Aditi Machado investigates transnationalism and translation in poems that follow a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first century “silk route.” As on the original silk route, this merchant is engaged in economic transactions but also cultural exchanges, un-monetizeable reciprocities, the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins moving from hand to hand, the smell of food and sweat infusing the air, the “noise” of translation and multilingualism. Is this tradeswoman in control of her “destiny”/business or is she a commodity of impenetrable global forces? Her investigative, digressive travel seems a way to interrogate history and money and her own entanglement in such irresistible threads.

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WINNER 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.

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WINNER of the JUDITH A. MARKOWITZ AWARD 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER LONGLISTED for the HEARTLAND BOOKSELLERS AWARD In this debut collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.

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In the twenty years that followed America’s bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and Continental theory. Arranged chronologically, the reader will discover classic texts of New Narrative from Bob Gluck to Kathy Acker, and rare materials including period interviews, reviews, essays, and talks combined to form a new map of late twentieth-century creative rebellion.

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In Invasive species, Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees—the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.

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At the heart of Repetition Nineteen are twenty-five unreliable translations of a poem in Mónica de la Torre’s first book, written in Spanish. She embarked on this new genre-defying project after realizing she had been living in New York for as long as she had lived in Mexico City, where she was born. The works here focus on translation as displacement, mediation, and a form of code-switching. In the latter half of the book, “Replay,” we get a glimpse of de la Torre's translation practice in action as she invites passers-by to participate in series of translation experiments during an artist residency in Madison Square Park. Given the nativism of our current climate, both halves of Repetition Nineteen celebrate translation’s possibilities and political relevancy.

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With an English as ebullient as it is macabre, Nathanaël’s novel plunges its reader into a filmic world redolent of unsolved crime and suspicion. Part noir, part philosophical investigation, part literary subterfuge, Feder tenders image over evidence as it exfoliates the inside-out life of its protagonist Feder, at once aloof and queerly omniscient, with a propulsive intimacy that all but breeds a sense of the narrator’s complicity in the narrative’s central travesty. In this reality, municipal sewer systems are brimming with bodies drifted in with the tides, the last century’s architectures have gone unpeopled, and a minor mishap on a tram can cause the sudden death of a stranger across a continent. Feder offers no simple set of problems and solutions, but the texture of an electric curiosity at play in language.

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This volume gathers a diverse group of writing, from essays and correspondence to poems and songs, written in honor of Kathleen Fraser on the occasion of her eightieth birthday and celebrated at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco on March 22, 2015. Contributors include Steve Benson, Carolyn Burke, Norma Cole, Beverly Dahlen, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Robert Glück, Brenda Hillman, Jeanne Heuving, Cynthia Hogue, David Larsen, Marina Morbiducci, Patrick Pritchett, Frances Richard, Eléna Rivera, John Sakkis, Lauren Shufran, Brian Teare, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, and Hazel White.

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No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. The poems here take many forms—prose, lyric, epigram, narrative, dialogue fragment, song, musical score, fairy tale, and dictionary entry. An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.

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The Middle Notebookes began in French, as three carnets, written in keeping with three stages of an illness: an onset and remission, a recurrence and further recurrence, a death and the after of that death. But the narrative only became evident subsequently; the malady identified by these texts was foremost a literary one, fastened to a body whose concealment had become, not only untenable, but perhaps, in a sense, murderous. It is possible, then, that more than anything, these Notebookes attest both to the commitment, and the eventual, though unlikely, prevention of, a murder.

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The Devastation, a performance novel or poem, is based on the fallibility of a single image: a sea-wreck in language, the lovers on the floor of the sea, a sea of poetry, current, currency, connection—the world. How do we value "impoverished speech" or try to find abundance in impoverishment? A narrative that stems from "an image that is never exhausted" whose affect pervades the function of the whole, The Devastation is a lyric exploration of relation and community.

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Is there any avant-garde? What's at stake when 100 writers think through issues of accessibility and audience? This is a book comprised of answers—to these questions and their offspring—as various and contradictory as its contributors, ranging from Eileen Myles, Lyn Hejinian, and Joyelle McSweeney to Blake Butler, Jenny Boully, and Rikki Ducornet, among dozens of others. The results here provide discrepant engagements on the most pressing questions of the literary, the political, and the force of what's possible for writers in the 21st Century.

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How do we react to disaster, to political uprising, to spectacle? With relief missions, donations, and what words? While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It, the second book by Lytton Smith, explores the relationship between poetry, news, and the lives of others. Poised between Brecht's critique of empathy and Martha Nussbaum's politics of compassion, this powerful collection plays with direct address and personal testimony as it investigates the relationship between ethics and the aesthetic. Drawing on sources that range from travel guides, BBC reports, contemporary art exhibitions, and sixteenth-century debates about masque, Smith's book offers a range of forms that test the edges of the page, the borders of communication.

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Fire Break is a suite of untitled lyric poems which move through a succession of present moments, bringing through the weave both hard-edged engagement and uncommon harmonics. In the mix can be heard messages of desire, physicality, global imbalances, and ultimately, creation.

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A collection of poems that demystify drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety whilst thinking through their relation to capitalism and its resistance, the family, and a writer’s compulsion to write.Boiled Owls refers to an old colloquialism: to be as boiled as an owl, to be drunk. Azad Ashim Sharma turns the phrase into a surrealist exquisite corpse in which the body and mind of a drug addict melt into the seams of personhood, spreading out into the wider world and recovering friends, family, love, and humor as strands of support. Troubling the dogma and pop cultural representations of twelve-step program discourse, Sharma emphasizes the mundane and non-linear aspects of recovery, ultimately positing addiction as an internalization of capitalism and recovery as the development of a socialist consciousness.

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"We Press Ourselves Plainly is a particularly affecting development in an already virtuosic, Ovidian body of work because it renews and makes newly visible crucial continuities: between Continental and North American Postmodernism, the Nouveau Roman and New Narrative, WWII and Operation Enduring Freedom. From out of agile and Celinian ellipses, Nathalie Stephens creates an asynchronous, transnational 'discordance...in time,' a hugely amplified recent past whose familiarity haunts us not as nostalgia but as trauma. Among 'immaculate and catastrophic' ruins and lacunae, having forgotten 'the sentence for behaving,' the narrator embarks upon an 'adverse and objectionable' litany of a history whose abjections yield a kind of nihilistic courage: 'Hope is for martyrs.' Given that now 'even the fictions are fictions,' Nathalie Stephens puts 'holes...where there were none' as a way of underscoring that there's nothing inevitable about gender or genre or violence, just as 'What is inevitable is not the war but the language that determines the war.' As grim as Beckett, as moral as Genet, as seductive as Duras-yet this book moves me like no other." - Brian Teare

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A Fast Life establishes Tim Dlugos-the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic-as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time. This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume's editor, poet David Trinidad.

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After Hurricane Sandy, Nick Fowler, a writer, stranded alone in a Manhattan apartment without power, begins to contemplate disaster. Months later, at an artist residency in upstate New York, Nick finds his subject in disaster itself and the communities shaped by it, where crisis animates both hope and denial, unacknowledged pasts and potential futures. As he travels to Los Angeles and London on assignment, Nick discovers that outsiders—their lives and histories disturbed by sex, loss, and bad weather—are often better understood by what they have hidden from the world than what they have revealed.

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A new volume of aphoristic prose and philosophical poetry from Etel Adnan, whose work The New York Times recently described as the “meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism.” She writes: “Reality is messianic/apocalyptic/ my soul is my terror.”

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The body of the filmmaker is itself a discrepancy. This may be one of this book’s claims, if it were to advance something like an argument. Instead it writes its way through to a dry swamp, in the elusive company of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mizoguchi Kenji, and the albatross, evincing procedures of extinction that owe something to both translation and photography. Its armament, approximating the latent architectures of the Berlin Wall, is held up against the declensions of film, its destructibility. What might otherwise be read as a criminal investigation whose many pieces of evidence reproduce a body whose principal characteristic is that it is found neither in language nor at the edge of a scrubby beach.

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A book of unruly love poems about complicated sexuality, precarity, and kinship Working from the sticky interface of property and sex, Stephanie Young takes up the question of passing when narrow definitions of family on offer by the law and capitalist social relations leave out so much. With a cast of characters that includes lovers and exes, Troilus and Cressida, Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead, Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala, Pat Parker and Judy Grahn, the orca Tilikum and his captors, Pet Sounds is at once a book of confessional economics, music criticism disguised as poetry, and a complicated coming out story. These poems pulse with the pleasures and grief of making a home inside structures that don’t fit—on land whose value climbs ever upward in the frenzy of speculation. 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER

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Action in the Orchards’ explores ekphrastic poetry and its possibilities through experiences and encounters, with art and architecture, with friends and lovers, with our own pasts and futures, how they intersect with language, and how language acts as a filter through which our relations to experiences are communicated. Fred Schmalz follows the energy of those exchanges, in hopes of witnessing new opportunities for language. Formally experimental and musical, the poems coalesce through a kaleidoscopic mix of speech fragments, elision, mistranslation, collage, appropriated language, dream transcription, and wordplay.

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Camp Marmalade takes the freedoms of trance utterance—unfettered verbal association, explicit auto-ethnography, erotic bricolage—and applies a more stringent sense of time-as-emergency to this liberation-oriented poetic method. Part diary, part collage, part textbook for a new School of Impulse, Camp Marmalade assembles a perverse and giddy cultural archive, a Ferris wheel of aphorisms, depicting a queer body amidst a dizzying flow of sensations, dreams, and sex-and-death distillations—whether sugary, fruity, bitter, expired, or freshly jarred. “Like an impossible love child from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, Wayne Koestenbaum inherited all their stylistic wonder and laser-beam smarts, but with the added point-blank jolt of sex.”—Bruce Hainley, Bidoun

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The Pink Trance Notebooks is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of "trance notebooks" as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis - voiced with aplomb and always on point. "Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity." - John Waters

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A 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.

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Sonically vivid, as empire and climate fall into catastrophe, these poems open portals where the living and the dead find one another in new communication.From Shelley Memorial Award Winner Gillian Conoley, Notes from the Passenger reminds us how with increased gun violence, war, plague, white supremacy, we are no longer “in control.” We are no longer drivers; we are passengers––destination unknown. Arriving like missives from a bardic journey, these poems explore how system collapse has led to a new space-time continuum. As our perception/projection of world shifts in the quotidian contemporary and historical—even ancient—time, these cinematic linguistically vibrant poems seek new order beyond division, within catastrophe and joy, written on the edge of being.

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A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play—all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world.In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.

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​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.

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A reissue of the Santa Clara County poet laureate's lauded second book that deals with translation, grief, and reflection of lineage and identity. like a solid to a shadow is a documentary poetry collection about grieving, fatherlessness, and the limitations of language. Sapigao finds her deceased father’s love ‘letters’ to her mother: cassette tapes recorded in Illokano, a language of which she has imperfect knowledge. The book moves through Sapigao’s process of translating and transcribing the tapes; playing with, learning, and unlearning the Ilokano and English languages. This book then launches from the tapes to ask “what can we really know?” when it comes to family lineages and personal histories. Through family trees, photos, and mapping, Sapigao articulates, distorts, and heals her knowledge of the man who is her deceased father.

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WINNER of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction!WINNER of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction!“Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world.”—Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Making of the Atomic Bomb In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives―from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama―the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.

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2022 HOUSATONIC BOOK AWARDS FINALIST!2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST!2021 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST!A new collection of poems by Lambda Award winner, Rosamond S. King, conceptualizing state violence, racism, and the persistence of black desire, resistance, and joy All the Rage addresses everyday pleasure as well as the persistent condition of racism in the USA—a time marked both by recurring police violence and intense artistic creativity. At its core dwells the 'Living in the Abattoir' series, set in an alternate yet familiar world, in which people of color live in an abattoir as both workers and meat. All the Rage addresses the contemporary realities of life in the USA from a variety of perspectives: being a black person, an immigrant, a woman, and queer. The title All the Rage simultaneously invokes both anger at ongoing, systemic violence and the frivolity of something that is, perhaps temporarily, “trending.”

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OBB a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy has many identities: it is a comics poem and a manifesto on comics poetry; an experimental comic book sequel to a poem twenty years in the making; and an homage to the Mimeo Revolution, weird fiction, kamishibai, the political cartoon, Pilipinx komiks history, and the poet bp Nichol. Javier deconstructs a post-9/11 Pilipinx identity amid the lasting fog of the Philippine American War, to compose a far-out comic book awit.

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On the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John received the Book of Revelation, two writers find themselves mired in an uneasy sense of timelessness, where history and the present jumble together. As they hunt for a lost portrait of the iconic gay novelist Hervé Guibert, they discover that the island’s insistent isolation from the global catastrophe surrounding it, from the refugees interned on nearby Samos to the fascist rise in Europe and the United States, is more pose than reality.

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Vibratory Milieu weaves together eight years of writing and the author’s daily practice of collection to build a glistening web of perception and interconnection, including bits and pieces from a myriad of sources: current events, news briefs, facebook & twitter quips, the movie “Carrie,” Buddhist texts, and feminist theory. Hunter’s own writing practice becomes material for the collage as she culls lines from journals, poems written to music, poems written after meditation and dreams, poems written in response to friends’ poems, poems inspired by the Divine Comedy (itself a collage text). What emerges from the field of language is a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, friendship.

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Begun as a response to a front page photograph illustrating a tragedy that the media quickly sensationalized in the early 2000’s, Wolf tells the composite truth of two brothers, a family friend, a father, and a murder. Skeptical of news cycles and the way trials become page-turners, this book forgoes the standards of true crime: quick conclusions and moralistic underpinnings. Instead, motivated by an attempt to extend empathy, its reconstruction unfolds in tones of witness and meditation. What results is a story about the extremities to which deeply unchecked abuse and ongoing trauma can push a family.

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Alisoun Sings finds its starting-point with Chaucer’s iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Her forceful voice leads the way across narratives of genders, and addresses the brutality of social conventions with caustic humor. This labyrinthine text navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English, beyond its dominance as a global lingua franca, and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages.

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Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a “foreigner” in a country to which he is bound by “the first page of his passport” is the author’s principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.

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Caroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.

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WINNER of the INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE WINNER of the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD FINALIST for the 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD On October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.

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WINNER of the 2020 FOUR QUARTETS PRIZE LONGLISTED for the 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST for the the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST for the KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

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The Blue Absolute’s prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. People move and think amidst a flurry of dots and dashes in a constant shift of perspective and action—urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming—each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity. The book closes with “Shiver,” an American epic, at once a lament for and vision of a great city on the edge: San Francisco past, present, and future.

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