Search results for ""Nightboat Books""

A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, “The Beautiful One,” comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson’s poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.

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Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.

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An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.

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WINNER of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureFinalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry! A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

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A collection of epistolary poems that exorcises and explores the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory. In DESGRACIADO, Angel Dominguez navigates language and memory to illuminate the ongoing traumas of misremembered and missing histories and their lasting impacts. Dominguez unravels a critical and tender language of lived experience in letters addressed to their ancestral oppressor, Diego de Landa, (a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Maya language in Mani Yucatán, on July 12th 1562), to articulate an old rage, dreaming of a futurity beyond the wreckage and ruin of the colonial imaginary. This collection doesn't seek to heal the incurable wound of colonization so much as attempt to re-articulate a language towards recuperation.

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WINNER of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology’s Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award! Path-breaking lesbian poet & scholar Judy Grahn returns to the stories of Inanna the Mesopotamian goddess of erotic love and justice to reimagine the contemporary world.In her trademark lusciously erotic writing, Judy Grahn illuminates eight dramatic stories exploring the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna’s power and relevance for contemporary queer feminist audiences. Psychologically rich, morally and ethically exhilarating, passionate and full of life, these stories reimagine central western myths, including the book of Job and Gilgamesh with women and queer people as central actors. In every sentence, Grahn proves how revisiting origin stories is a vital world-making activity.

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Historically, much landscape art has reinforced binaries such as inside/outside, subject/object, and culture/nature, thus reducing a complex network to an ornament that reinforces a sense of human power over nature, imposes specific cultural values, and/or claims or exercises control. And yet there are also artists who have developed alternatives to conventional depictions of the world around them, using landscape to participate in the earth, active in its view and its viewing. The art addressed in the book presents landscape as engagement rather than as detached observation, encouraging an increased sense of belonging to, and thus responsibility for, the earth.

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As Ronald Johnson wrote, William Benton’s witty and inventive Birds single-handedly resurrected the Concrete Poetry movement. First published in 1972 by the Graphic Arts Workshop of the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon, as a limited edition of 200 copies, this new edition includes an introduction by Benton as well as several new poems.

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Written during an autistic breakdown after his father’s sudden death, Sweeney’s visionary elegy for the living occupies the voice of the newly dead. Through shifting identities, genderless, omnigendered, bereft and haunted, this work affords an intimate mapping of grief—and a vision of what consciousness remains after the body.

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Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

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Taking Walt Whitman's Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern's Music for Porn moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor.

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Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.

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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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Grabeland takes place in a country that no longer exists, in a culture rooted in soil and projections. Like a travelogue, the story tours the inner exiles of its characters as they test the limitations of their actual existence. Focusing on Germany and The United States, Grabeland dramatizes the formation of national identity and ultimately its dissolution through an accumulation of personal and collective experiences, anecdotes, accidents, propaganda, falsifications, histories, victimizations, inventions, dreams, and hopes.

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