Search results for ""omnidawn publishing""

Stark lyric poems that outline the fragility of perception and the obstinacy of being

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Winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize

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Poems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls. This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them.

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Using a replica of the native Chamorros' outrigger boats as his figurative vessel, this title explores the personal, historical, cultural, and natural elements of the poet's native Guam.

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Tender lyric poetry dedicated to two of the poet's most influential late teachers. Julie Carr's most intimate book to date, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr's foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tenderat times erotic at other times bitterthese poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering. Reaching toward the ghost companions in the thicket and to the beloveds who still pulse with activity,Underscore's sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called overlapping kinespheres.

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Poems that offer an anti-capitalist consideration of life and selfhood for women in contemporary society. The poetry in Elizabeth Scanlon's Whosoever Whole asks how we arrive at and nurture a sense of self amid a culture that wants us only to consume. Navigating the fractal and often fractured experiences of a citizen, a parent in the time of climate change, and a woman in an embattled era, Scanlon invites the reader into an interior space filled with anger, joy, wonder, and hope.Employing metaphor and metonymy, these poems portray a series of courageous portraits of the many faces a woman must wear to survive in today's culture. Whosoever Wholeis an anti-capitalist love song to all who refuse to be torn apart by the market valuation of their lives.

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Stories that question our experience of time, truth, and memory. Through the stories in Shadows and Clouds, Marcus Stewart invites us to consider how things are not always as they appear or as we remember them, instead locating reality in the imagination and the dream world. While animals understand the world without words, humans create our experiences as stories, translating past and future into tales told in the present. Stewart's stories take the notion of storytelling and expand to a consideration of how truth, misremembering, logic, lying, and uncertainty play together to affect our experience of reality. In an alternate reading of time, Stewart poses the suggestion that you may already have a future memory of reading this book, and reading the stories backward may bring us back to the present.Shadows and Clouds is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook / Novelette Contest, chosen by Theodora Ziolkowski.

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Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize

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The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican—American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America. Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody’s collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past.Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn's 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.

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

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An epic meditation on contemporary American catastrophe and struggle

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Calvin Bedient's fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The multiple in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful-witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly-the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn't really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that is not-one . . . the rhapsodic is the avenue to the truth, as Alain Badiou says, the quality of the rhapsodic in The Multiple is as cacophonous and unforgiving as it is lyrical and hooked. The truth is extreme, this aggressively uncensored book says, as it battles to give equal power to a savage voice and a soaring voice. Strong in their invisible architecture, these are poems of wild openness and shee

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Collects the poems that reflect on human relationships.

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This novel tells of a young man's attraction and ultimate addiction to skunk musk, and the social difficulties he encounters as a result.

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Bridging traditions of secular, religious, modernist, and post modernist writing to encounter living at its most provocative and urgent, Caton's poems -- at times conversational, meditative, minimalist, and expansive--are unified by an insistence to reach, with language, through language, to what is ever outside a word's ability to name.

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Back in print, Carr’s powerful poems seek out and face violence and its counterforces. Julie Carr obsessively researches instances of intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs. She searches for what can be learned from the statistics, the statements by and about rapists and killers, the websites of hate groups, and the capacity for cruelty that lies within all of us. 100 Notes on Violence is a diary, a document, and a dream log of the violence that grips America and devastates so many. But Carr also offers a layered and lyric tribute to violence’s counterforces: love, commonality, and care. Her unflinching “notes” provoke our minds and burrow into our emotions, leading us to confront our fears and our own complicity.

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Poems derived from momentary reflections saved in the poet’s subjectless emails. The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal and the everyday. This collection draws inspiration from the idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the poet would clear small periods of time to write and record observations and thoughts, then send it to himself in untitled emails. The book takes the shape of an impressionistic twenty-first-century diary, reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the conflation of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is hermetically sealed in their private world, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. Through moment-to-moment reflections, (no subject) digs deep in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder.

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A poetry collection in nine sections that each take on an aspect of memory. The poems in t/here it is take multiple forms as each section reflects on variations of experience, engaging with the simultaneity of historic and present time while yearning for a future that is beyond what we can envision. In Section I, the poet grapples with ancestral legacy and connection to the natural world. Section II deals with the way one traverses the urban landscape and with various strategies of survival, and Section III recalls the observations and experiences of youth. Through nine linked poems, Section IV complicates the idea of witness under a capitalistic system bent on exploitation and devaluing the sacred human experience. Section V speaks to the lost opportunity of making profound human connections during the race to acquire more material goods. In Section VI, the poems take on the domestic and institutional places that govern our lives. A single poem forms Section VII, mapping the intersection between jazz and emotion. With Section VIII, Anderson pays homage to jazz greats and reflects on the ways that listening can carry one back to moments of growth and lamentation. The two poems that close out the book in Section IX bring the reader to a place of vulnerability, expressing the desire to be able to discern the multiple avenues of one’s journey with awareness.

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A poetry collection that employs intuition, humor, and celebration while seeking to break out of restrictive social structures. Mary Wilson’s Both, Apollo speaks from inside the bodies and binaries that so often act as constraints. It sometimes tries to negotiate its way out. It laments, celebrates, reasons, jokes, and occasionally begs. It runs into a wall and hugs it, offers it pizza, and speeds through grammars and cities until dizziness catapults it from the grid. It tries to queer the echoes of its language in the hope that a rhyme might break the logic of “either/or” and give rise to “both/and.” Both, Apollo is a love poem to whatever has the grace to appear, quietly finding hope. Moments of humor and tenderness accompany the speaker with each act of crossing and circling back. The poems in Both, Apollo are constantly in flux, and Wilson’s lyricism acts as a teaching tool for using both the real and the imagination to guide us in moment-by-moment navigation of our world. Both, Apollo won the Omnidawn Chapbook contest, selected by Victoria Chang.

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A bilingual collection of poems that offers a surreal perspective of urban experience. This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard’s lyrical poetry is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates an intimate series of poems drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems comprise an evocative distillation of postmodern urban life with a sharp sense of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty and struggles for survival and intimacy. The poems capture the emotional and ecological surroundings of each city and its people. The cities in Brossard’s poems feel surreal and in them dwell survivors of “misfortunes,” living in urban landscapes with their “gleaming debris” and “bridges, ghats, / rivers in a time of peace and torture.” These poems gesture toward a transmuted social context and toward a quest “to meet the horizon the day after the horizon.”

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Written as a conversation, 100 Words is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens, and ideals between someone White and someone Brown. Two poets, Damon Potter and Truong Tran, write to each other about one hundred powerful words—like “proximity, “shame,” and “hope”—each of which is an abstraction rife with socially inscribed beliefs and denials. They turn to each other in an exchange, a negotiation, and a series of discoveries as they write of their individual histories, share their burdens, and learn to carry weight together. ​ Tran explains this project, saying “it is occurring to me even as I am writing this now that this is not an experiment, or case study or collaboration or partnership. Damon is not the subject nor am I. This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.”

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Tropical Lung is a collection of writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a vision of Panamá and the Tecumseh Republic where technology is necessary for understanding the ancient, then is erased and transcended by an ever-present electronic circle. Roberto Harrison combines poetry and visual art in this surrealist vision of a world both historical and reborn, where the futuristic links to the ancient. Harrison looks to symbolic beginnings, spaces of light and mystery that counter disassociation with explorations of the foundational structures of personhood.Tropical Lung shows how apocalypses can give us the keys to new futures and how aloneness and silence can lead us to live multidimensionally, beyond the boundaries of time and space. The screen makes itself known and offers a means of kinship, but it is also removed by song and born in the red of encounter and the dark of seven pupils. These wild visions coalesce into a fantastic vision of a future both technological and communal.

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From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this collection of poetry is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real, and imagined. Jennifer Hasegawa scans across physical and mental planes to reveal their inhabitants. Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit. Hasegawa’s poems not only rearrange our ways of seeing the world, but they also reset the language we use in it. Banzai, with a literal translation of “10,000 years,” was used by the Japanese as a rallying cry in imperialistic and militaristic contexts. Today, the understanding of this word has shifted to a comparatively neutral translation of the enthusiastic expression “Hurrah!” in both in Japan and beyond. In La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, Hasegawa aims to reclaim banzai, recasting the language of war and unwavering loyalty and forming it into one that stands against aggression and racism and embraces tolerance and self-acceptance. Here banzai becomes a rallying cry not of war but of grand potential. La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living chronicles a celebratory life and poetry filled with wonder.

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Scatterplot navigates a vast landscape of imagination through variations on being lost and found. David Koehn’s investigative journeys allow space for the failures of consciousness and gaps in the knowable as he traverses a sensory terrain through the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. In this wilderness is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California delta, searching through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but also requiring, love. Koehn diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and his own family into a web of coordinates that form constellations of beauty and tragedy. He moves from the music of the Bad Brains, to the grotesque lifecycle of the Tongue-Eating Louse, to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys, and on through the poems of David Antin and the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, building a fantastical world from the wild realities of the real one. In a universe so full of imperfection one can’t help but both laugh and cry, the poet embraces the present while taking responsibility for his own insufficiencies. Amounting to a mix of experiments—erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking poems, and more—the delta between right now and forever feels both inescapably present and delightfully confused. Immense vulnerability, infinitely odd observations, and uninhibited daring populate the psychological terrain in the poems of Scatterplot as Koehn invites us to join his spiraling poetic exploration.

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In henceforce, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s poems take us on unimaginable voyages within and beyond the contours of our quotidian experience. This is not simply geographic travel, however: though Hilliard’s poems explore air travel, transcontinental locations, and even intergalactic scenes, their travel poetic asks us to move through and beyond deeply entrenched social boundaries. The movement depicted and encouraged here brings the reader into contact with figures that destabilize our notions of race, gender, and nation. Hilliard’s language, too, transgresses boundaries. For any reader who loves strange encounters with the familiar and the thrill of disorientation, these poems will prove challenging in a deeply exhilarating way, asking the reader to question the limits of their gaze, their language, their sense of place, and ultimately to reaffirm their personhood.

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Poetic assemblages that consider the ways in which one act of creation (motherhood) threatens to erase another (writing)

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This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems. In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn’t treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation. Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolina opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.

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A debut collection of lyric psychodramas

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A debut meditation on the body across national and linguistic borders

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Selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2015 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest

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Our Animal hybridizes novel flaking into poetic forms like a gnat swarm, magnetic filings, or migratory flux. It's a fierce inquiry into Othering, tracking Kafka's life through his identification with animals, especially those hunted or outcast. We are entangled in biography as biology-paradisiacal transfiguration that leaves out no being.

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Winner of the Omnidawn Fiction Chapbook Prize

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Terse, provocative poems that question the assertions of our modern era

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Poems that unfold an interiority in which the self's unspecialness is allowed to touch the sublime

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With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.” Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.

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Grappling with the shock of her grandmother’s suicide, mai c. doan undertook a writing project that might give voice to her loss as well as to grapple with memory, and the challenge of articulation and of documentation, in all of their contradictions and (im)possibilities. In the poems that comprise water/tongue, doan conjures visceral and intuitive elements of experience to articulate the gendered and intergenerational effects of violence, colonialism, and American empire. Breaking the silence surrounding these experiences, doan conjures a host of voices dispersed across time and space to better understand the pain that haunted her family—made tragically manifest in her grandmother’s death. Looking not only to elements of Vietnamese history and culture, but to the experience of migration and racism in the United States, this book charts a path for both understanding and resistance. Indeed, doan does not merely wish to unearth the past, but also to change the future. If we want to do so, she shows, we must commune with the voices of sufferers both past and present. doan demonstrates how even the form of a work of poetry can act as a subversion of what a reader expects from the motion of the act of reading a line of type or a page of text. doan disarms and unsettles the ways a reader is led to levels of comprehension, and thus disrupts what “comprehension” might mean, as the reader follows the flow of a work, providing an opportunity to sense, and to confront hierarchies that structure ordinary reading and writing. doan brings a reader to conscious appraisal of the hierarchies that affect us, and how these hierarchies can constrain our insights and our mobility. water/tongue is a critical read for anyone interested in the long effects of gendered and cultural violence, and the power of speech to forge new and empowering directions.

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