Search results for ""Nightboat Books""

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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Here the “beheaded” poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: “How does thinking happen?” “What does thinking feel like?” “How do I think about the future?” The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called “the sensuous intellect,” what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.

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In Je Nathanaël, first published in 2006, Nathanaël explores ways in which language constrains the body, shackles it to gender, and proposes instead a different way of reading, where words are hermaphroditic and transform desire in turn. Suggesting that one body conceals another, it lends an ear to this other body and delights in the anxiety it provokes. With parts written in French, other parts in English, this is truly a hybrid text, throwing itself into question as it acts upon itself in translation. It is both originator and recipient of its own echo. In this regard it does not, cannot exist, pulling insistently away from itself in an attempt to draw attention to the very things it seeks to conceal. In this way, Je Nathanaël is a book of paradox, negating itself as it comes into being.

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Originally written in Portunhol - a Spanish-Portuguese mix from where Brazil and Argentina border Paraguay - with Guaraní, Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea is a homage to life, to being embodied, to border crossing, and to language itself. Who is its Paraguayan narrator who has loved two men, old and young, in a hot/cold beach town in Brazil? A woman, as she says? A gay man switching pronouns? Paraguayan Sea is a river-to-the-sea of identities and migrations, its Portunhol translated into Frenglish by the polylingual poet Erín Moure.

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Described as "dazzling" by Edmund White and as a poet "who has The Gift and delivers The Goods" by Kenward Elmslie, Donald Britton published just one book of poetry, Italy, before his death from AIDS in 1994. A Kind of Endlessness: The Selected Poems of Donald Britton reprints Italy alongside previously unpublished and uncollected poems to display the full range of Britton's fresh, vivid language and subtle humor. It is poetry by turns glamorous, wistful, intellectual, and elegant, the sharp-eyed observations of a penetrating mind lost to the world too soon.

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Artist and writer Felix Bernstein's first book of poems mordantly stages his attempt to pick between family, lovers, coteries, and solitude. Drawing on the story of child muse Eva Ionesco, Bernstein troubles the melodramatic coming-of-age story with his neurotic self-critical ruminations. Does the pouty, post-digital, coquettish boy have recourse to transgression? To answer, Bernstein rummages through the closets of his queer and familial lineages and finds many skeletons in waiting. Awkward, fragile, imposing, parodic, and earnest, these poems push brooding indifference into elegy and seduction. Burn Book, full of correspondence and confession, is an irreverent and irresistible treat for those readers who dare to be burned.

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Javier's new book of long poems is both intimate and elusive, a simultaneity brought to the fore by the author's interest in the occult and intuitive processes, in oblique and plain spoken discourses. Politically and erotically charged, Court of the Dragon eludes programmatic ideology, packaged identity politics, and confessionalism in its interrogation of the praxes of everyday living. Written over the course of a year, this striking new book conjures its future through intuition, improvisation, and magick.

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In a series of poems quiet but savage - in the many senses of that word - Gabriella Klein lays bare the prospects of an individual in times of ecological disaster and personal and political upheaval. These poems are gyroscopic, telescopic, microscopic. Insects and universes each are as grand and intimate as the other. The star, the forest, mud, a daughter, the Chinook wind, a honeybee, the sea - they all have as much agency and presence in this work as the poet/speaker herself.

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From his early spare poems written in Spain to the recent ruminative work exploring language, tradition (often Jewish and diasporic) and the self, this book collects four decades of Michael Heller's "tone perfect poems" as George Oppen described them. Enriched with the detailed landscapes of the phenomenal world and mind, This Constellation Is a Name confirms Michael Heller's place at the forefront of contemporary American poetry.

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In Partially Kept, Ronk's elegiac and lyrical poetry responds to a world marked by transience and loss. Quotations by 17th century essayist Sir Thomas Browne highlight historical shifts in language, creating intertextual poems that consider the botanical world, the art of photography, and philosophy. Ronk's attention to rhetoric and representation speak to the shifting temporality between one thing and another, between one mind and another.

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In her original author’s note to the 1999 edition, Akilah Oliver writes,“What I am trying to do in these poems is investigate the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.” the she said dialogues: flesh memory proves to be not only still timely twenty years later, but essential reading for understanding intersectional politics and poetics in our current moment.

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A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss. In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day.  In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.

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A cross-genre book of poetry, photography and notes for choreography, A Lily Lilies maps space through language, language through movement, and both space and movement through pictures in sections that move from immense spaces of the American Southwest to a dance stage in Philadelphia to the space of the self.

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Beginning with an epigraph from the 9/11 Commission Report, The Book of Interfering Bodies re-imagines the poet as bureaucrat, barbaric writer, and terrorist. In this book, poems that invoke the role of the writer in society alternate with apocalyptic prose pieces that recall Borges' "Library of Babel." In the process, Borzutzky creates a 21st century response to our most enduing twentieth century writers, from Beckett to Lispector.

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In a combination of discourse and lyric, paragraph and couplet, Bay Area poet and novelist Laura Moriarty explicates the poetics of a group of writers that resists categorization. This book-length essay uses the work of the California Tonalist painters to articulate new understanding and new possibilities for poetic practice.

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This edition restores to print a central text of the New Narrative movement, founded in San Francisco by Boone and Robert Gluck in response to the stagnation of contemporary experimental poetry of the late 1970s. Wishing to bring the vigor and energy of the gay rights and feminist movements, Bruce Boone's writing of the late 1970s is as fresh, funny, witty, and self-reflexive as it was thirty years ago. First published in 1980, Century of Clouds, based on Boone's experiences at the summer meeting of Marxism and Theory Group in St. Cloud, Minnesota, takes up issues of sexuality, political and theoretical identity, religion, and friendship in the characteristically rich and varied writing of the New Narrative movement.

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Poet and performer Edwin Torres's extraordinary new book emerges in five riveting sections with a thematic undercurrent examining the body, love, journey, direction, and talk. These poems, intimate and expansive, use lyrical tone as an entry into communication, allowing experimental pieces and quiet poems to coexist. Black-and-white art illuminates the text and contributes to the lingual density while adding a figurative translation to the work. The overall sense is one of internal combustion, a sensory experience within the allegory of the human condition.

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"In ABSENCE WHERE AS, Nathanael reads the unread book, 'the book that comes' to us nevertheless, that haunts and hovers unopened and dreamt, proceeding from the Ecrits of the visionary and revolutionary artist-activist Claude Cahun, to life's library. Through this constellatory essay in the faults of thought, in reading's flaw, Nathanael comes to know and know how, creating new epistemological and aesthetic territory in the radiant continuum between lyric and narrative, the text and the dream of text, which is literature itself"--John Keene

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The Sorrow And The Fast Of It exists in a middle place: an overlay of indistinct geographies and trajectories. Strained between the bodies of Nathalie and Nathanael, between dissolution and abjection, between the borders that limit the body in its built environment--the city and its name(s), the countries, the border crossings--the narrative, splintered and fractured, dislocates its own compulsion.

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"Celebratory, even radical"—The New Yorker "Monumental"—Hyperallergic We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age 11 until his AIDS-related death at 39. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure. 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER

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Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha’s invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry. Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

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A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”

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LONGLISTED for the 2020 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST for the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD In Stéphane Bouquet’s The Next Loves, French poetic tradition meets the New York School poets in a unique take on homosexuality, desire, loneliness, and love in an era of global inequality and fundamental precarity. Bouquet’s work delicately carves out space for passages from I to you to the collective we.

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What I Knew engages activities and knowledge that can’t be mined or verified by search engines or easily surveilled. Sourced from poetry’s ancient materials of dream, memory, story, and experience, What I Knew aims to create a site of resistance to, and refuge from, our current overflow of information and fact-checking, where private desires and whims cannot be commodified. It seeks alternative, personal forms of globalization rather than the public forms we know.

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Personal Volcano is about the sublime physical presence of volcanoes and the author’s direct experience of them, as well as the history of catastrophes connected to volcanoes in California and around the world. It is a meditation on ecopoetics, the implications of global warming, and the catastrophes to come. Volcanoes have caused famines and even extinctions in the past and yet volcanoes are an ephemeral phenomenon in the context of geologic time and, much like people, barely take up a moment in the vast changeable history which can include the elimination of creatures at the top of the food chain like ourselves. FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDS SHORTLISTED for the GOLDEN POPPY AWARDS

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Crosslight for Youngbird explores the slipperiness of borders, as well as borders’ tentacles: mother tongue, language and mastery, citizenship and nationality, migration and flight. These poems are concerned with the demands we make on our body, the limits of those demands, and ultimately, how everyone inhabits space.

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In Vigilance Is No Orchard, Hazel White records her haunting romance with the Valentine Garden, created by landscape architect Isabelle Greene in the foothills of Santa Barbara, California. Jealous of its maker’s power to affect a dynamic experience of space, White tries to make language play faithfully in the game coursing between the body and Greene’s fiercely stirring landscape. Both the poems and the constructed landscape they describe are complex and explorative, never simplified. Instead their interests are survival, forage and repair, the act of making, accumulation and overflow that results in flowering and eventually gives way to loss. Praise for Hazel White: “I set this book down and wept…It is the most beautiful piece of writing I have read in many years.”—Bhanu Kapil

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Philosopher-playwright Alain Jugnon’s a body, in spite introduces this prolific French author to an English-speaking readership. The aphorisms that comprise this slight philosophy for actors are an inventoried body with and without its defenses. With incisive humor, Jugnon casts his intellect into the many-organed world, to draw from its semantic recesses a sort of divine putrescence. This work, written for the stage, and received as a presage, reads like an autobiography of Nietzsche’s last laugh. This bilingual edition features an afterword by the translator.

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Aligned with queer theories of temporality, fragments of memoir rub against the language of psychiatric and medical regimes at the site of a body that does not conform to a gender binary. Some Animal draws out dream-like and supernatural resonances between the literature of pathology and experiences of gender dysphoria.

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On Walking On looks outward onto—or rather, walks through—the work of various writers for whom walking was or is an important element of daily life. The number of writers who were or are serious walkers is striking, and the connection goes back to antiquity, more recently including Woolf, Nerval, Sand, Debord, Sebald, and many others.

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Alli Warren’s I Love It Though looks hard at the material and affective world we’ve inherited, including the ordinariness of the sublime and the sublimity and transcendence of what’s most ordinary. This book makes meaning of our contemporary moment, both sharp and vulnerable, concrete and musical. These poems are committed to living in the present, delirious with outrage and hope for something better.

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Bruce Boone is a critical figure at the crossroads of late twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. Dismembered is the long overdue collection that spans nearly five decades of Boone’s life, from the early 1970s to the present. Collecting published and fugitive works alike, from poems and narratives to reviews and essays, this volume is crucial for anyone moved by writing that is at once sexy and political, gossipy and militant, scholarly and aesthetic. Praise for Bruce Boone: “Bruce Boone has the perfect cadence of a real writer, part awe, part critique. He can see.” —Peter Gizzi

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Who That Divines comprises short songs and puzzles and longer poems of memoir and history-all of which assert an unconventionally feminist sense of the possibility of locating the divine in language, politics, and daily life. Moriarty's position as one of the most important writers of a postmodern lyric is confirmed by this dynamic collection that also includes the text of her experimental memoir "An Air Force."

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The Mausoleum of Lovers comprises Guibert's journals, kept from 1976-1991. Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself - a mausoleum of lovers - comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.

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An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden’s most influential and beloved poets. In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of “clear velocity.”

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A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art.  In these interviews with journalist and editor Laure Adler, conducted in the months before her death in November 2021, Etel Adnan traces with depth and emotion the founding experiences of her artistic approach, between poetry and painting. From her youth in Lebanon, her American years in New York and California, to her late recognition at Documenta in 2012 and her life in France, the conversation covers philosophy, painting, poetry and aesthetics, as well Adnan''s views on history and politics in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. These transcripts usher the experiences and observations of Adnan''s long and rich life into an intimate and spontaneous conversation with a dear friend—a window on the “universe” of her imagination.

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A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito—part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito’s beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one’s life through the logic of flora. Ito’s graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.

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A book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual; struggle and resistance.Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.

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A timely reissue, the typographical experiments of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven make visible the hidden experience of chronic pain and illness. During uninsured and ineffectual medicalization, Teare turns to the work of writer and abstract artist Agnes Martin, which offers both counsel and consolation when diagnosis fails. Harnessing the power of the grid intrinsic in the typeset page, the resulting poems balance language and silence in visual fields that give shape to somatic knowledge. Rejecting bad care and the false promise of cure, this book reimagines what healing looks like.This edition includes a new interview with the author by the poet and scholar Declan Gould!

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An autohistoriography of felt time that arises from subversive hearing practices and the emotional prosody of a mother tongue one does not understand but activates in another poetic language.Comprised of three long poems, Teeter knows experimental forms can be as intimate as mothering; knows we can understand languages we do not speak. From “Hearing”'s intensities of attention, to “Ambient Mom”’s familial Filipino immigrant soundscapes, to “Histories”'s careful scrutiny of the socially-sanctioned narratives and trajectories to which we are meant to aspire, Teeter’s lessons in listening reverberate across career retrospectives and heritage languages, colonial histories and domestic intimacies, reattuning us to what we’ve neglected to notice in our efforts to create a life we can understand.

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​​A moving collection of essays that bring poetic insight to the sheer facts of the AIDS epidemic, in an attempt to make meaning from suffering.​​Unbound is a poet’s intimate account of life in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s during the apex of the AIDS epidemic. In his search for meaning, Shurin dives down into the broken-hearted, revelatory core of the social landscape and the lives of friends who both succumbed to and transcended the disease. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Unbound continues the search, resonating inescapably with the perils of our new pandemic. Shurin brings to life a familiar world tensed on the threshold of living, balanced precariously on the edges of love and friendship, family and community, rapture and mourning.

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A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century’s most beloved French gay writers.My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his master’s finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master’s wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won’t let him watch variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.

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FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureA kaleidoscopic debut collection of poems performing queer excess and lyric ecstasy. This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build towards an expansive world celebrating fluidity while casting a critical lens on state power, ecological precarity, and the yearning for queer utopia on stolen land. Referencing lineages of poets, musicians, workers and neighbors, as well as conversations between lovers and friends, stemmy things is a vision unraveling, breaking open to make space for glimmering while reckoning with the body’s multiple contexts. Layered, lush, and lavish, these poems offer up tangling, blossoming desire.

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A collection of poems about starlight, survival, resilience, and acceptance after experiences of profound grief.Steeped in the bluest apocalypse light of solar collapse and the pale, ghostly light of personal devastation and grief, Aerial Concave Without Cloud rests in the light of human mortality. Through a combination of academic research and the salp’uri dance form, Sueyeun Juliette Lee channels and interprets the language of starlight through her body and into poetic form. In doing so, Lee discovers that resilience is not an attitude or posture, but a way of listening. Through deep conversation with this primary element, Lee finds the human fundamental inside herself.

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"Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—The New York TimesFINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of AmericaSet in a speculative present, Madness alternates between poetry and editorial commentary to investigate how language spans a life.Madness is a selected poems for a fictional poet: Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a minor name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. This is a story of the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.

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The chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy. Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.

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Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer’s coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago’s South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy’s politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. Find here, in these new, uncollected and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.

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