Search results for ""Omnidawn Publishing""

To Be Read in the Dark casts its strobe of radical vision on the dark crises of our common experience. Personal and prophetic, these compressed lyrics are capacious in meaning. Here is a penetrating appraisal of the underlying politics and philosophical disposition of our daily struggles, both formally relentless and epic in scope. These are poems you will want to read aloud, letting this language spotlight a navigable course into and through the dark.

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A poetry collection that considers climate change and the possibility of wholeness within the Anthropocene. Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction. These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation.

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Poems that personally engage with the materiality and danger of earth. A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem “Earth Took of Earth,” this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke’s attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth—for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase “heaven on earth,” turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.

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The poems in Boyish reveal a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, following the poet from a Louisiana Baptist upbringing into transgender liberation. With a sense of rebellion and the revival of the hollered voice, this is an urgent narrative propelled by the necessity of upheaval, imagining what happens when we break through barriers of systemic violence and communal oppression to reconsider what could be. Boyish looks back at the status quo in order to move beyond, into a dream of a nonbinary utopia. A reckoning, this collection brings the reader along for revolution—a deep belief in possibility. Each page builds tension that then shatters, bringing us into the interior of a story. Brody Parrish Craig invites us to carve out a space and to find ourselves carried over the gravel along the creek. Moving through the subconscious and embodied desire, these poems are rich with formal play, twisting language in dense sonnets. Landscapes of the city’s dystopia meet the queer pastoral, where conservation often means knowing what must be burned down.

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In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.

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Acting as poetic records of light, the poems in Variations on Dawn and Dusk follow the sun as it warms, cools, colors, and shifts the space of Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in the desert of Marfa, TX. Built on the footprint of the town’s old hospital, Irwin’s permanent installation is a remarkable structure with walls, windows, and screens that both capture and are taken over by the sun’s changing light. Through this deeply engaged ekphrasis, Dan Beachy-Quick uses language to participate in the overpowering elegance of Irwin’s structure. The poet’s fervent observations lead us in cycles of meditation, moving with the light that slides through the surfaces of the installation. Here, the very foundation of our vision—light—forms the vocabulary from which these poems are built. Building from Irwin’s use of rhythm and structure, the poems in this collection are constructed with an architectural framework. Rhythmic procedures inversely link the first and last words of the first and last lines of each poem and tie the number of lines to the number of syllables in the first line. These structures form a pattern, a thoughtful consistency through which we are invited to move and meditate with each variation of light.

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An ekphrastic series of poems that troubles and illuminates embodiment and encounter

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A lyric and historical examination of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong

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Dialogic juxtapositions of poetry and art's vantage points

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Illuminations of humanity's separation and embodiment of animal nature

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A lyric examination of life and poetics from this esteemed writer and translator

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Scientific elegies of ambition and failure from this esteemed poet

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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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