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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The politics and poetics of language, culture and self all collide in Myung Mi Kim s Dura, a contemporary classic of Asian American and experimental literature, brought back into print by Nightboat Books on the tenth anniversary of its orginal publication. This edition features a preface by Juliana Spahr and an afterword by Stephen Hong Sohn.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet’s Novel provides a unique entrance to the rare prose of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting, and action. Contributors: Brian Blanchfield, Anne Boyer, John Keene, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C. D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results. Kazim Ali on Fanny Howe Dan Beachy-Quick on W.G. Sebald Edmund Berrigan on Ted Berrigan Brian Blanchfield on Aaron Kunin Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Gertrude Stein Julia Bloch on Gwendolyn Brooks Anne Boyer on Elizabeth Barrett Browning Traci Brimhall on Hilda Hilst Vincent Broqua on Stacy Doris Brandon Brown on Kevin Killian Lee Ann Brown on Carla Harryman Angela Carr on Nicole Brossard Julie Carr on Lyn Hejinian Norma Cole on Emmanuel Hocquard Brent Cunningham on Laura Moriarty Mónica de la Torre on Martín Adán Marcella Durand on Robert Creeley Patrick Durgin on Tan Lin & Pamela Lu Norman Fischer on Phillip Whalen C.S. Giscombe on Audre Lorde Judith Goldman on Leslie Scalapino Carla Harryman on Gail Scott Jeanne Heuving on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Laura Hinton on Alice Notley Daniel Katz on Jack Spicer John Keene on Fernando Pessoa Karla Kelsey on Barbara Guest Aaron Kunin on Lewis Carroll Sonnet L’Abbé on M. NourbeSe Philip Abigail Lang on Jacques Roubaud Kimberly Lyons on Mina Loy W. Jason Miller on Langston Hughes Mette Moestrup on Ingeborg Bachmann Laura Moriarty on Keith Waldrop Laura Mullen on Bhanu Kapil Denise Newman on Inger Christensen Aldon Lynn Nielsen on Amiri Baraka Geoffrey G. O’Brien on John Ashbery & James Schuyler Jena Osman on Thalia Field Julie Patton on Jean Toomer Elizabeth Robinson on Rosmarie Waldrop Jennifer Scappettone on H.D. Susan Scarlata on Forrest Gander Brandon Shimoda on Etel Adnan Cedar Sigo on Eileen Myles Sasha Steensen on Anne Carson Donna Stonecipher on Peter Waterhouse Brian Teare on Rainer Maria Rilke Tyrone Williams on Nathaniel Mackey C.D. Wright on Michael Ondaatje Lynn Xu on Ben Lerner Rachel Zolf on Juliana Spahr

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Kathleen Fraser's inventive new book showcases poems from four recent collaborative artist books that exhibit "her longtime love of words as objects into play" (The New York Times). These new poems, many created through her unique collage and hand paste-up techniques, continue Fraser's ambitious exploration of the boundaries of language and the limits of the page.

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The Black Condition ft. Narcissus is preemptive memoir, documenting the beginning of the author’s gender transition and paralleling the inauguration of our latest Administration. These poems speak to and from fears holed up inside while contextualizing the cosmic impacts of our political landscape. Ranging from autobiographic melancholy to rigorously meditative, here is a necessary voice to process the world, predicated on unknowable desire and blossoming tragedy. Winner of the 2019 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award!

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The Estrangement Principle argues for a wider range of possible associations with art made by queer people by unraveling the difficulties of the “queer art” label. Goldberg invokes the lives and works of artists Renee Gladman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Jack Waters & Peter Cramer, and others to bring into focus the problematics of categorization in art and literary histories. This book-length essay mixes cultural criticism, close readings, and personal anecdotes, all the while developing a deftly wrought tension between a polemical voice and one of ambivalence. The Estrangement Principle is an exercise in contradiction with the ultimate goal of resisting the practice of movement naming.

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In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making.  In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnighta churchy holiday of messianic tarryingand steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacementfrom countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.

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Laura's Desires is a diptych of two formally distinct long poems, each approaching various pop-cultural artifacts as a way to engage with longing, vulnerability, and the possibility of liberation. Referencing pop culture artifacts, from hit '90s singles like Selena's Dreaming of You to heroines of cult classic TV and films (Laura Palmer and Variety's Christine), this dynamic collection looks to these iconic touchstones as sites for feminist analysis and intervention. Traveling through dreamscapes, fantasy, and the quotidian, Laura's Desires forges a path away from fear and shame, guiding us towards liberation.

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A debut poetry collection about Earth and to Earth that contemplates imposed systemsgender, capitalism, time, wage and exploitationand how they are mapped onto us, the trees, and the planet.Immersed in a tangled weave of contemporary life where big box stores and suburban parking lots coexist alongside the instructive silence of juniper trees and a pulsing waterfall, Our Air sketches the possibilities of eco and social interdependence during late-stage capitalism.Their inscriber, Nora Treatbaby, is a trans woman reckoning with the constraints of gender categories, when being a woman is an implausible dream and an insane vibration. With sincere curiosity and a sprinkling of levity, these poems advocate for the world-building potential available in a material commitment to gentle friendship with all networks of life on Earth.

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A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss. Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

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A selection of extraordinarily condensed, emotionally complex, philosophical poems by one of the most unique and highly regarded 20th century Brazilian poets.In her lifetime, Orides Fontela resisted all labels, all attempts to situate her work in a particular movement, school, tendency, or tradition. Here, in her first ever English-language collection, Fontela’s poetry continues to defy easy categorization. In these concise, meditative poems, Fontela’s bird and flower, water and stone, blood and star can be read as symbols, indicating a possible tendency toward mysticism. Including an illuminating statement of poetics and excerpts from her often acerbic interviews, One Impossible Step introduces English-language audiences to an iconoclast who remains one across languages and decades.

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A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm – one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).

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The acerbically funny and intimate screenplay for acclaimed visual artist Martine Syms's debut film, The African Desperate.The African Desperate follows Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in upstate New York and ends at a Chicago Blue Line Station. Set against the lush backdrop of late summer, Palace navigates the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world. Shot through with Syms’s celebrated conceptual grit, humor, social commentary, and vivid visual language, The African Desperate leads us through picturesque landscapes and artists studios, from academic critiques to backseat hookups, and from the night of a wild graduation party to the morning of a lonely trip back home.

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A collection of poems that explores the radical love inherent in revolutionary work through cultural objects, adolescent affect, and queerness from within the fall of empire. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive queer punk movement that emerged in Spain during its transition from Franquist Fascism to democracy, La Movida moves from bed to street to river, defending memory and falling in love along the way.

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A collection of lyric meditations cultivated from a deeply personal experience of the natural world, synthesizing the poet’s experiences of the elemental and ephemeral; presence and place. In Of Mineral, Tiff Dressen initiates a chemical reaction, taking place on the page so meaning is continually created and destroyed. The forces at play create a beautiful and unpredictable stability. With intentionality and deep attention, the poet undergoes an elemental education, learning through articulation how to experience the natural world as an active participant rather than as an observer. As the poet attempts to synchronize their left and right brain, boundaries between the urban and the “wild” dissolve to form a more unified experience of presence.

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A reprint of trans poet, activist, and teacher TC Tolbert’s beloved debut collection of poetry.In Gephyromania (literally, an addiction to or an obsession with bridges), Tolbert’s choice isn’t between female and male, lover and self, or loss and relief, but rather to live in the places where those binaries meet. Is a bridge simply an attempt to connect one body back to itself? Sensing the parallels between a lover who leaves and his own female body as it chooses to recede, the poems in Gephyromania explore the spaces between, among, across, and even within bodies.

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Linked stories alighting from a U.S., Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character Virgil, and his accounts on race, sex, and desire. Virgil kills forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations—revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots: Manhattan, Guam, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Berlin, Iloilo, Provincetown, Millington, San Francisco, Long Island, Western Mass. Virgil moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios, and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., characters—“Butch,” “Stream,” “Clean”—his precise unfurling.

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A sequence of poems that interrogates American civics and citizenry from its foundation in the pastoral tradition.In Irredenta, Oscar Oswald raises the prospect of pastoral opposition to state power, elaborating and investigating the genre through ethical and spiritual inquiry. As a citizen is a stranger to itself, so too does Oswald’s pastoral speaker define the tensions between identity and nationality inherent in a civic body as they are traversed across the American political geography: land, water, and country, from the Mojave to Wisconsin.

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A triptych of wild, lyric love poems that are, at heart, an ode to Arkansas. Set among blue Ozark creeks, hoods of trucks, and changing constellations, Cody-Rose Clevidence’s poems call up embodied sensations as they arise, with love and anguish, in a specific place. Navigating between senses and the sensed world, in lyric, lushness and density, Clevidence constructs an intricate and playful poetics both experimental and emotive to investigate the interplay between the vivid sensations of the body and the viscerally surrounding world.

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Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

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The color green is at the center of the spectrum. For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, the green world was a space of haunting, irreconcilable, opposites: life and death, human and vegetal, innocence and experience. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, poet and scholar Gillian Osborne adds a third, contemporary, term: the environment as both vital and ailing. This is nature writing outside of adventure or argument, ecological thinking as a space of shared homemaking: reading, writing, and living in vicinity with others.

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Erica Hunt writes at the intersection of poetry and emancipatory politics—racial and gender justice, feminist ethics, and participatory democracy—showing us that altering our reading strategies frames our experiences. Ultimately, she finds that words matter, savoring the small ones: articles, pronouns, collective, plural and singular. This collection brings together out of print works and journals of the same period, to speak across “crumpled” time, the past seen from then to now. 2021 Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards Poetry nominee!

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This marks the publication of the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant's classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the "way of the world." Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant's Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

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Dawn Lundy Martin's Life in a Box is a Pretty Life investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.

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In Andrew Durbin's Mature Themes, texts flow in and out of media realities and consciousness like images on a Tumblr dashboard. He assays the controversies and topologies of public lives mired in sex, secrecy, and fame, where celebrity subjects and anonymous speakers bleed into one another, sharing the dreamy, often darkly funny space of a Hollywood. These poems pursue the other, secret realities that lurk in a pressurized empire, an earth, on the verge of collapse.

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Through the recurrence of memory, myth, and grief, 回 / Return captures the elusory language of sorrow and solitude that binds Taiwanese diasporic experience.Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

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In Like Bismuth When I Enter, Carlos Lara engages in the purely creative aspect of language—its synthesis of dream and waking world. In these vibrant, hallucinatory poems, inspired by the element bismuth and its iridescent, surrealist structure, Lara attempts to produce a collective surge of new imagery, new mind states, and structural undoings. Like Bismuth When I Enter captures that moment when the universe strikes one with the unmistakable reminder of mystery via the quotidian and the elemental.

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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.

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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.

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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

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