Search results for ""Nightboat Books""

Nightboat Books is proud to bring back this long out-of-print ecstatic, collaborative performative work. Written and arranged in an experimental mode akin to music or choreography, these fragmented lyrics create space and resonance honoring the physical splendor of both the body and the poem. This new edition includes several new poetic sequences and an extended essay.

Read more less

WINNER of the 2022 Four Quartets Prize!2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST! Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, Imagine Us, The Swarm offers seven powerful texts that form a constellation of voices, forms, and approaches to confront loneliness, silence, and death.Following the death of the poet’s father, Imagine Us, The Swarm contemplates vengeance, eschews forgiveness, and cultivates a desire for healing beyond the reaches of this present life. In this collection of essays in verse, Leung reconciles a familial history of violence and generational trauma across intersections of Asian American, queer, and gendered experiences. Moving between the past and the present, Leung imbues memories with something new to alter time and design a different future.

Read more less

MacArthur “genius” Douglas Crase is best known for his invocations and revisions of Whitmanian transcendentalism. Out of print since 1987, his book The Revisionist has still been enough in some opinions to establish him as one of the most important poets of his generation; on its strength, says the Oxford Book of American Poetry, "rests a formidable underground reputation." Now, by combining The Revisionist with Crase's chapbook The Astropastorals in a new collection, Nightboat Books presents his formidable reputation to a wider public for the first time in thirty-two years.

Read more less

MacArthur “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.

Read more less

These poems crackle with aplomb and verve as they try to measure the distance between the ear, an organ of touch, and the often chaotic and sometimes orderly vibrations the ears permit the body to receive; in that gap between trust and faith is this collection of poems—a devotional book that prays to the senses for mercy. It’s tricky.

Read more less

Vincent Katz's new collection, his first in a decade, presents an aesthetically and emotionally diverse series of poems that attempt to tune in to particular details of the poet's life, from friends and family to larger geopolitical issues.

Read more less

As in the title phrase-borrowed from a 17th century poem by Robert Herrick-in which "several" is used to individuate, questions of singularity and the plural, of subjectivity and the collective, pervade this dream-quick poetry. In A Several World there are glimpses of an "us down here"-in the understory, in the open clearing-and, by various projections, there is frequent attainment of an aerial vantage, a post otherwise abdicated. Landscape here is spatial theater, and a choreography recruits all standalone selves: solidarity beginning in an erotics of attunement, catching likenesses. "This clever, busy, anxious, flirtatious poet, with his 'predilections for predicaments,' can connect anything to anything else." -Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review

Read more less

Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star, Gracie Leavitt's first full-length collection, draws on rich lyric history, the love poem as prism, in an effort to create a postmodern pastoral. Leavitt's lines-a baroque tracery, sometimes dark, teasing prose, and pronoun-packed-and unstoppable syntax define her unique poetic vision. This idyll, with its bucolic scenery, its domestic scale, its erotic charge, charges forward into an ecofeminist future.

Read more less

This book stands for: a) a close translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit b) a mainly at arm's length appropriation of some poems by Paul Celan these being two extremes in language of c) a log of disasters d) a register of miracle e) also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love

Read more less

The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets-literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard's poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English "translations" includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others. In the tradition of Ezra Pound's Cathay or Jack Spicer's After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them-imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as:"THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER ... SETTING FORTH."

Read more less

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.

Read more less

On the eve of Bern Porter's Centennial, his classic text, Found Poems, comes roaring back into print in a handsome new edition featuring two essays contextualizing his remarkable life and work. As Dick Higgins said, "Porter's Found Poems have the same seminal position as Duchamp's objets trouvées." This book collects Porter's strongest "Founds," his combinations of mass-media images and text that he used to reflect American culture as in a funny-house mirror: twisted but true.

Read more less

Named for Leland Hickman's unfinished, long poem, "Tiresias," this volume gathers all of the poetry published during Hickman's lifetime as well as unpublished pieces drawn from his archives at the University of California, San Diego. With this book, Hickman's innovative, emotional, and absolutely unique confessional verse will join the landscape of twentieth century American experimental poetry.

Read more less

Nylon''s Most Anticipated Books of 2024 The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023 Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar. In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie’s childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there’s always dinner at Marg’s. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene a

Read more less

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic. As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Sex Goblin channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.

Read more less

In Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, Jasmine Gibson explores myriad intersectional identities in relation to The State, disease, love, sex, failure, and triumph. Speaking to those who feel disillusioned by both radical and banal spaces and inspired/informed by moments of political crisis: Hurricane Katrina, The Jena Six, the extrajudicial executions of Black people, and the periods of insurgency that erupted in response, this book acts as a synthesis of political life and poetic form.

Read more less

A Year From Today traverses a many-layered urban terrain—social, political, poetic, animal—in a form more raw than a diary, weightier than a series of sketches, more idiosyncratic and implicated than a conceptual program. Among this volume’s many insights is how we spend our days detecting, minute-by-minute and phrase-by-phrase, an overarching aesthetic and moral design. It’s for the kind of grown-up who might say, “don’t/look for/who’s really in charge c’est moi.” And for the kind of sensitive brigand who might add, “maybe the way to go about this/is to stay within earshot & sip the Wild Turk.”

Read more less

The Old Philosopher is enigmatic, sexual, biblical, anachronistic, political, and personal all at once. These quiet, implosive poems inhabit a nonlinear temporality in which Vi Khi Nao brings biblical time and political time together in the same poetic space, allowing current affairs to converse with a more ancient and historical reality.

Read more less

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage and a politics of liberation, to weave together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint's crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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?

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Lyric Multiples comprises four essays written over the last decade. The subject is poetry but the essays range over such topics as the evolution of the human call, ascensional modes of thinking, pop songs, the built environment and its discontents, the post-punk moment, its fruitful aftermath, and much else. Throughout this book, Albon explores unencountered varieties of aesthetic experience and the contributions they make to an ideal of social interconnectivity.

Read more less

Livingry is anxious lyric, marking the witchy daily as spun by a woman processing grief, vexation, fear, expectation, kinship, disintegration, rage, exhilaration, hope and dedication. These poems—ragged edges against which something like a politics catches—might best be seen through tall grasses. Meanwhile, a messy prose thaws, pools beneath the lineated surface of this lush second book.

Read more less

ESL or You Weren’t Here tells the story of a queer Pinoy who immigrates to New York in the 1990s in order to be reunited with their parents. What follows is the poet’s awakening to the legacy of American imperialism & colonialism in the Philippines, and to the experience of living between languages, cultures, temporalities, and genders—untranslatable. ESL asks the reader to bear witness to embodied histories of forced immigration, separation and abandonment rooted in patriarchal racism.

Read more less

A lyric cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

Read more less

The poems in Hotel abc function as ethnographic notes, exposing the fact that we are all under the thumb of circadian rhythm, struggling to negotiate our shared condition. Reporters and hotel guests leave and enter the book, revealing that the face of the beloved is also an icon, that some sounds can only be heard in certain places and that the origins of language are impossible to locate. Praise for Susan Gevirtz: “Her poetry moves through passageways of mystery, words weighted with a permanent tension on a background daringly displaced.” –Barbara Guest

Read more less

Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings, Newports, and love, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption vs. the whitebody s idealized reflection) with live Black bodies. Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love, intent, identity, hybridity, and how we embody these interstices. Albert Murray said, The second law of thermodynamics ain t nothin but the blues. So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, and the world, and of how the world treats us?

Read more less

Hell Figures ventures into the fragmented mythical and literary histories of Helen of Troy, Sappho, Cassandra, Antigone, and others by way of our current condition of perpetual war, violence, and environmental destruction. Grinnell employs the transliteration of musical forms, such as the fugue and humoresque, and homophonic translation as methods of giving form and voice to obscured, inaudible, illegible, unintelligible, and omitted subject positions

Read more less

The varying poetics of both ancient and modern Arabic poetry inflect this book-long exploration of the materiality of the body, negotiating the terrain of love—and its denials. Zaher explores the landscape of life fraught with disappointments and occasional triumphs through fragments, lyrics, metatextual pauses, stutterings, translations of ancient poetry, and the occasional late-night email. This epic foray into fraught emotional territory is alive with Zaher’s particular gift of keen observation, deft whimsy, and superb intelligence.

Read more less

The talks gathered in Asclepias: The Milkweeds are all concerned with discrepancy and extinction. Polylingual and transdisciplinary, each essay addresses translation as a form of disagreement and photography as its mis-fitting corollary. Calling up an indiscriminate range of thinkers and artists - philosophers, composers, photographers, filmmakers, poets - including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Dmitri Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Sergio Larraín, Günther Anders, Alejandra Pizarnik, Antonin Artaud, and Friedrich HÆlderlin, among many others, the resultant montage repeatedly abandons the reader to an empty, incriminating, theatre.

Read more less

LETTERRS is a book of poems that examines and interrogates language to its core, the shapes and sounds. In these poems Orlando White explores the origins and existence of letters, words, typography, the white space of the page, and their philosophical values to the writer/reader.

Read more less

Poet and scholar Susan Gevirtz's new book Coming Events (Collected Writings) undertakes the search for what she calls a "third apprehension," via questions concerning childhood learning; the vexed subject of discursive writing; film as writing's cousin; becoming "a voyeur of translation"; and a woman writer among women writers, who offer support, dialogue, and challenge. In this remarkable hybrid work, Gevirtz steps outside formal constraints to interrogate structures of making and meaning in the conduct of the writer in writing.

Read more less

Jill Magi's new book-comprised of fiction, poetry, and archival research-LABOR explores relations between workplace and workers, race-class-gender, the institution and the body, the "personal" budget and the economy, the archive and undisciplined paper trails. An "employee handbook" sequence runs throughout the text, providing a set of directions for ritual practices toward individual agency and workplace/worker transformation. But unlike the archived ideologies and hopes of traditional labor history that LABOR's characters eventually abandon or never fully embraced, the transformation does not look like traditional progress or reform.

Read more less

Jessica Fisher's second book of poems brings lyric's intensity of perception to an era of global war while chronicling the everyday motions of new motherhood. In this elegant and elusive work, the inmost moves outward, like sight or voice, into the external world.

Read more less

Jonathan Weinert s award-winning collection, In the Mode of Disappearance, transcends contemporary categories of traditional and experimental, existing in a mode in which the quality of thought itself is paramount.

Read more less