Search results for ""Omnidawn Publishing""

Extending beyond lyric, narrative, documentary, dramatic monologue, this text invites and incites, violates and revitalizes our awareness of what frames our relationship to culture, community, self

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Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures. Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant” can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address—as place, as person, as memory, and as event —Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,” among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.

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Poems in a range of forms that consider the queer body, chronic illness, and love amid rural plains landscapes. Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love. With the body caught in medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, Weber questions how to create a poetry fashioned both despite and out of endings. You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis explores forms with plainspoken prose poems with a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness.You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang.

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Two books bound together that interrogate race—one from the perspective of a man of color, and the other from the perspective of a white man. This book brings together different perspectives under two titles, considering the lives and experiences of two friends, one Vietnamese American and one white. Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of yearning, regret, and righteous indignation. In Truong Tran’s poetry, what is said and what is written reveal our complexities. Composed as an investigation of his own being and body as a brown person moving through white spaces, this collection moves alongside Tran’s friend and collaborator Damon Potter. Seeing and Looking offers a record of Potter’s perspective as a white man examining who he is and wants to be and the complications of trying to be good while also benefiting from histories of oppression. Potter considers death—both his own future death and the deaths of his friends—while grappling with how to witness horrors, wonders, and his self.

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A story set in Prague that crosses the lines between the living and the dead. The great love of your life is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from communicating with you—or luring you to join him in the afterlife. To remain safe in this world, you accept the help of a professional medium who develops his own emotional agenda. The Ghost Trio that emerges takes us to pre- and post-World War II Prague where a poignant and chilling love triangle finds its resolution. There we meet great Czech creators of the past including Leoš Janácek and Karel Capek. Inspired by the ghost stories of Henry James and Daphne du Maurier, Clyde Derrick introduces three characters whose passions defy time and the accepted boundaries between the dead and the living. The author, who has lived in and visited purportedly haunted sites in advance of writing this novella, contends that this story and its characters found him. Meanwhile, his portrayal of two Pragues—one poised to fall to Hitler’s army, the other muted by Communist oppression—offers us insights into the past and reminds us to stay vigilant against dangerous politics. The Ghost Trio is a spiritual excursion in which we ponder the limitations and hazards of romantic love as well as the possibility of other lives in other times. The Ghost Trio is the winner of the 2020 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook / Novelette Contest, chosen by Molly Gloss.

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Lyrical satire that imagines mental illnesses as various bird species. Ewa Chrusciel’s fourth book in English, Yours, Purple Gallinule, playfully explores health and illness as they are culturally constructed. Using research into clinical understandings of mental afflictions and their treatments through history, Chrusciel maps various diagnostics onto an array of bird species. A lyrical satire, the book is a reflection on a society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, and over-medicate. These poems pose questions about what it means to be unique and to accept pain and suffering as a fact of life. On the pages of Yours, Purple Gallinule, we encounter birds, a poet, and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist undergoes a series of conversions as she realizes that the point is not to classify thoughtlessly, but to “make music instead”—to dwell in astonishment. Birds evade the anthropomorphizing intentions of the human protagonists as the psychiatrist and the poet eventually become one. The anthropomorphizing goes in reverse, and the human being becomes more avian. Like the dove in the biblical Noah’s ark story, the bird proclaims a new covenant, with a twig in its beak and a message: “We are all mad; some more than others, but no one is spared the affliction. And the madder we are, the more sacred.”

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Life in a multicultural, multiethnic nation like the United States leads to complicated, sometimes fragmented experiences of our background and identity. In Locus, Jason Bayani’s poetry explores the experience of identity that haunts Pilipinx-Americans in the wake of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, a critical moment left out of most histories of Asian-American life in the United States. Bayani’s poetry seeks to recuperate this silenced experience, rendering the loss of memory migration entails and representing the fragments of cultural history that surface in a new national context. Drawing inspiration from the mixing and layering of musical fragments in DJ culture, Locus lays down tracks of memory to create a confident declaration of a distinctly Pilipinx-American voice, history, and artistic power. Indeed, his work reveals how these new creations often tie us to the most fundamental parts of ourselves: our families, our cultures, the vague memories passed down through generations.In Locus, Bayani both renders the challenges of migration and captures an experience of selfhood and history, asserting a central place for migrant identity and experience in American culture.

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A mashup of poetry and theater collaged from the overlooked voices of California's labor class

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Spare, vivid lyrics on the microclimate of coastal California

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Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. LGBT Studies. I think of aspiration as the state where a poet's thrown together life-structures both invite and are breached by the poet's preoccupations-known ones, new ones. It's the dream of meaningful placement and the open set.

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To Be Read in the Dark casts its strobe of radical vision on the dark crises of our common experience. Personal and prophetic, these compressed lyrics are capacious in meaning. Here is a penetrating appraisal of the underlying politics and philosophical disposition of our daily struggles, both formally relentless and epic in scope. These are poems you will want to read aloud, letting this language spotlight a navigable course into and through the dark.

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A poetry collection that considers climate change and the possibility of wholeness within the Anthropocene. Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction. These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation.

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Poems that personally engage with the materiality and danger of earth. A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem “Earth Took of Earth,” this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke’s attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth—for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase “heaven on earth,” turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.

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The poems in Boyish reveal a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, following the poet from a Louisiana Baptist upbringing into transgender liberation. With a sense of rebellion and the revival of the hollered voice, this is an urgent narrative propelled by the necessity of upheaval, imagining what happens when we break through barriers of systemic violence and communal oppression to reconsider what could be. Boyish looks back at the status quo in order to move beyond, into a dream of a nonbinary utopia. A reckoning, this collection brings the reader along for revolution—a deep belief in possibility. Each page builds tension that then shatters, bringing us into the interior of a story. Brody Parrish Craig invites us to carve out a space and to find ourselves carried over the gravel along the creek. Moving through the subconscious and embodied desire, these poems are rich with formal play, twisting language in dense sonnets. Landscapes of the city’s dystopia meet the queer pastoral, where conservation often means knowing what must be burned down.

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In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.

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Acting as poetic records of light, the poems in Variations on Dawn and Dusk follow the sun as it warms, cools, colors, and shifts the space of Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in the desert of Marfa, TX. Built on the footprint of the town’s old hospital, Irwin’s permanent installation is a remarkable structure with walls, windows, and screens that both capture and are taken over by the sun’s changing light. Through this deeply engaged ekphrasis, Dan Beachy-Quick uses language to participate in the overpowering elegance of Irwin’s structure. The poet’s fervent observations lead us in cycles of meditation, moving with the light that slides through the surfaces of the installation. Here, the very foundation of our vision—light—forms the vocabulary from which these poems are built. Building from Irwin’s use of rhythm and structure, the poems in this collection are constructed with an architectural framework. Rhythmic procedures inversely link the first and last words of the first and last lines of each poem and tie the number of lines to the number of syllables in the first line. These structures form a pattern, a thoughtful consistency through which we are invited to move and meditate with each variation of light.

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An ekphrastic series of poems that troubles and illuminates embodiment and encounter

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A lyric and historical examination of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong

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Dialogic juxtapositions of poetry and art's vantage points

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Illuminations of humanity's separation and embodiment of animal nature

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A lyric examination of life and poetics from this esteemed writer and translator

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Scientific elegies of ambition and failure from this esteemed poet

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Lyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia. In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems. Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.

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A collection by award-winning poet Kimberly Reyes that explores erased histories. Through her latest collection, Kimberly Reyes navigates the physical, hereditary, and liminal worlds between land, time, and memory. The poems in vanishing point. take us to San Francisco, Ireland, and the Atlantic Ocean, reclaiming and examining contested space as the poet seeks to revive left-behind histories, reconsider what we see, and reveal what we cannot see.

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A poetry chapbook that reflects on shifting time and tides through the language of the shoreline. Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral. McCarthy's extraordinary tides is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.

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Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality. At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Pushing back on capitalist messages of individuality, CHORUS instead seeks the multifaceted self that engages with the radical diversity that characterizes any healthy ecosystem or society. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the author asks, “Whose afterimage am I?” The sprawling, celebratory, mourning chorus of this book is the sum of many voices; the words of other writers, poets, and artists are interwoven with the author’s words. This is a celebration of language’s capacity to supersede bodily limits, mortality, and existential loneliness. Daniela Naomi Molnar’s chorus encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief. Rather than seeking resolution, these poems look through the lens of a fragmented self, dwelling in plurality, discord, and harmony. CHORUS is the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st /2nd Book Prize, judged by Kazim Ali.

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The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and—especially in the United States—reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal’s three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It’s only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself—and a turn to its affirmation of life.

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At once civil lyric and lament crying beyond civility, spiraling with kinetic intensity, a 21st century feminist book-length aria

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An anthology of experimental, innovative, cross-genre writing

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By one of America's most adventurous poets--Peace moves just beyond outrage and anger to bring the reader to revelations and shifts of consciousness, to possible visions and sightings in the shattered yards of the global dream

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Mortar is a text of stealth and volatility, of both explosive and empathic interactions.

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In a woods where bodger and cabinet maker are at work, Michelle Taransky's second collection of poems, Sorry Was In The Woods is that landscape where perspective is not singular, where waiting, worrying, watching, and recording are able to both arrange and derange our understanding of place. Taransky's subject matter suggests our pressing need to face directly into the reality of each moment, and to question what it means to be moral in this troubled world of ecological and cultural calamity. Yet her surprising language use and references will invite her readers to walk with her through the forest of Yeats' and Howe's Seven Woods, and to feel the presence of Bob Perelman's leaves, Zukofsky's bough, Olson's hand, and Gertrude Stein's tree. In these compelling poems, a reader will find many familiar images and figures, and yet sense how the forest of event is always just beyond our capacity to describe or understand it. A sense of fear and wonder at our circumstance is one of Taransky's

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A chapbook-length poem that explores the cultural and personal weight of Ohio's rail history

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fault tree is a book-length poem divided into three connected effects stemming from one undesired state: time. This text poses time as a governing body overthrown by a simple mental repositioning-only 'inescapable' because so few have tried to escape. Using interrupted narrative and a deceptively simple diction, the poem follows one character through his quest to wrangle time and prove his own sanity as well as time's true nature. Through his relating to time, questions of place, class, politics, and culture are cast as the inextricable results of time's manipulation.

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In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary pushes past the line and the fragment and toward the sentence, the thought trying to complete, the paragraph, a distinct passage. The poems, most a single paragraph, are comprised of several of the many things a paragraph is said to consist of, including, according to the OED: a distinct passage or section of a text, usually composed of several sentences, dealing with a particular point, a short episode in a narrative, a single piece of direct speech, etc. The first poem in the project, though no longer the first in the book, was written while reading Francis Ponge's amazing The Making of Le Pre, which reproduces his notes toward the poem Le Pre alongside a translated type-written transcription. The form of the notes-crammed into every corner of the page, gathering observation, research, reading, quotations, anecdote-suggested a more inclusive way to think and write. The book, with its not-quite 50 prose poems, is also an imaginary completion, a

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Banishing poets from the well-ordered city did not prevent the creation of fictions: SHAM CITY is the capitol of fictitious capital, a no place of evaporating value where things sue for ?damages resulting from sundown? and where ?the night is good for it,? able to pay us back. ?I began to sweat amid the cheering,? Harrison writes, maybe because, in a country where an entire village drowns ?in the sweet contents / of its privatized wells,? it's hard work to keep it real. And beautiful work. And weird.

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Hypnagogia is the transitional stage between sleep and wakefulness?an intermediary moment of physiological limbo where hallucinations and out-of-body experiences commonly occur. Kelli Anne Noftle's poems reside in this space of ?threshold consciousness? where a voice speaks to and from the other, hovering inside a liminal world of strange admissions and abstract silences. Her book, I Was There for Your Somniloquy, was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2010 Omnidawn Poetry Prize and is due for publication in early 2012. Armantrout describes the collection as a ?destabilizing meditation on our divided selves: our split brains and checkered evolutionary pasts.? A somniloquy, a speech one makes in one's sleep, weaves itself through the language, continually disorienting the reader and subverting subject matter, insisting there is a very precarious boundary between the conscious and unconscious, logical and illogical, dream and waking life. Other poems in this book dip below an oceanic unc

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Poems that consider the human body as a meeting place of the infinite and the mortal. Starting with the idea that the human experience is the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes the notion a few steps further by centering cosmology within a raced and gendered body. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems envision this body as a union of god and soul that, within our material world, encompasses love and hate, joy and despair. The body is a site of divine presence made mortal, electrified with the resonance of both the infinite and the human. In godhouse, we encounter the body as a site where the universe is made personal and celebratory, where the celestial endure the complications of flesh and friction forms between the glorious and the monstrous aspects of personhood.

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Poems that navigate the complexities of human relationships, personal ethics, and religious tradition. Wind moves through this collection, opening the poems to the dying beauty of the natural world, to the weathers inside the psyche and without, and to the connections between a family and between the speaker his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert. The collection navigates the intimacies of human relationships with others, the challenges of working as a lawyer trying to maintain integrity as others fall prey to corporate greed, and the complexity of holding a Jewish identity while being awake to tradition’s hold on the mind and its cost. Steven Rood offers a powerful account of how to be a human in dynamic relationships while also holding respect for the non-human beings that comprise most of the life on our planet. Rood employs structures and forms that directly relate to the content of the poems themselves. Spontaneous breaks and starts reflect the writer’s turns of mind, offering readers insight into the meaning and measure of the work.

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Poems that blur the boundaries of language and species, inviting us to imagine a new world. The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides—slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin’s poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings—slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts—morph and change in between boundaries. Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems’ composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world. Impastoral won the Omnidawn Open Book contest, selected by Brian Teare.

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A poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way. Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing “studios” where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times. Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed—and in the months afterwards—the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century’s racial and gendered conflicts—sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a “mixed economy” of poetry and prose.

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A painter and poet, Desirée Alvarez engages with the powerful forces of lyric and rhythm to create a collection that moves across time and place. Inspired by Lorca’s passionate cante jondo, or “deep song,” and her own family history with Andalusian flamenco, Alvarez weaves together a time-travelling epic that searches through myth, culture, and nature for the roots of identity. Navigating both her Latina and European heritage through works by artists of the ancient Americas and Spain, Alvarez maps intersections between personal and political history. Searching narratives both fictitious and real, Raft of Flame includes imagined conversations between a conquistador and an Olmec sculpture, between Frida Kahlo and Velazquez, and between The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch. In Raft of Flame, Alvarez constructs and fleshes out a fantastic narrative of personal and cultural history, offering glimpses into the art, history, and land that comprise her story. Her narrative explores how both nature and human populations continue to be trapped in the violence of colonialism. Vivid lyrics interrogate the complexities of mixed race, digging the dualities, upheavals, and casts of characters that underly Alvarez’s identity.Raft of Flame won Omnidawn's 2018 Lake Merritt Prize.

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Lyrical elegies absorptive of contemporary political economic discourse

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Winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Prize

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A new translation of the groundbreaking French work

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a text of constantly refracting mirrors providing us with insights beyond mere duality. These deft, inquisitive poems portray two Adams as external characters in an ever-shifting mythos while examining the inner double personae locked in self-confrontation.

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A chapbook of interlocking poems that weave together the lyric and the political

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What happens when the faith and community we once held close sours into an experience of tragedy? In Since Sunday, we find a poet who is rebuilding a sense of faith after fleeing religious abuse. Doubt, shame, uncertainty, and the pains of loss create the ground from which these poems grow. After severance from her religion, established values, and sense of direction, Tomaselli embarks on recovery as an active and intentional pursuit. The poems reveal a resilience that must be lived as a daily effort to cope with trauma and to root oneself in the present. Through wit, vulnerability, and rich lyrical language, Tomaselli invites us to walk with her through loss and on to a persistent process of discovery. The poems chronicle a cultivation of awe, unearthing a fresh faith rooted in the present realness of everyday experiences. Stripped of the orthodoxy that both grew and crushed her, she reconstructs a new core of trust for herself. Here we learn with the poet to seek celebration in daily life and to foster a sense of beauty from the mundane.

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