Search results for ""black ocean""

The fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.

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A collection of poems that gives new life and magic to the everyday. Radio Days offers a unique collection by Ha Jaeyoun in a distinct, clear style, distinguishing it from her previous works in English. Although her poems range widely in topic, they are united by lucid language and breathtaking imagery. Through vivid impressions of humid childhood summers, Radio Days is an extended meditation on the heartbreak of growing up and being alive. Together, the poems create a whimsical, quietly unsettling, and nostalgic universe that is easily entered while refusing to make obvious statements on loss and love.

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A linguistically experimental and socially engaged collection of poems that examines questions of colorism within an economically driven world.In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an “original shade.” In failing to find what he’s looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking, It’s not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.

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First English-language collection from a leading poet in South Korea.Kim Haengsook is one South Korea’s most eminent contemporary poets, but a complete collection of her poems has never appeared in English before now. This selection draws on her work across her career and five books in Korean. Haengsook's poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring. Built out of a language that incorporates a strategy of what she calls "precise ambiguity," her work radiates outward like great waves whose philosophical rhythm you can't help but get caught in.

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A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by an award-winning South Korean poet and novelist.By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim Solah’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world lurking with quiet dissonance and horror. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, including documentary, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer's relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves. While BTS light up the charts and Korean films gather international awards, Lim's poems paint a strange and disorienting map of the consciousness of the so-called "spec" generation that calls their country Hell Chosun. This is a voice on fire from a world on fire. Readers from Seoul to Seattle to Slovenia to Singapore will find it familiar. Since that world is also the one in which we all live. Curated by Jake Levine, the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series publishes new English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by both mid-career and up-and-coming poets who debuted after the IMF crisis. By introducing work that comes out of our shared milieu, this series not only aims to widen the field of contemporary Korean poetry available in English translation, but also to challenge orientalist, neo-colonial, and national literature discourses. Our hope is that readers will inhabit these books as bodies of experience rather than view them as objects of knowledge, that they will allow themselves to be altered by them, and emerge from the page with eyes that seem to see “a world that belongs to another star.”

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“This is a threat.” That’s how Hackers, Swedish writer Aase Berg’s seventh book of poetry, begins. Hackers is a furious, feminist book about wanting to “hack” the patriarchal system—both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the ‘hag’ behind the ‘hack,’ channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg “hags” back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence. The fury of the hacker/hag/captive/revenger is constantly boiling up on the edges of Berg’s compounds and highways, threatening to infiltrate the center. In these spectacular battle scenes and hacked pastorals, where nature is besieged by the highways of progress and the animals don’t give a damn about the humans, the hag rises.

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A debut English-language collection of hopeful and carefully attentive poems by one of South Korea’s most lauded young poets.This collection offers a selection of poems from Sin Yong Mok’s earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his evolution as a poet, alongside a complete translation of the poems from his fourth collection, When Someone Called Someone, I Looked Back. Beautifully translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé with close attention to the sonorous aspects of Sin’s lines, this collection also captures the larger themes within Sin’s work and his attention to the spirit of community and peaceful coexistence with others. These are poems with a powerful belief in humanity and the beauty of the smallest hopes.

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Elisa Gabbert’s L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

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This debut collection in English from Korean poet Moon Bo Young insists that you, as a reader, put down your expectations of what should be important or serious. While these poems are about god, death, love, and literature, they are also just as much about a hat with a herd of cows on it, science experiments on monkeys’ attention, the eating of cherry tomatoes, weeping carrots, and pimple popping. The surrealism and humor in these poems allow them to travel so far in the span of a stanza. Reading this book is like going on a picnic with your weirdest best friend and asking them what-if questions until the sun goes down—there’s room for everything, from dark anecdotes to funny quips and surprising vulnerability. This book is like that: there’s room for everything. Skillfully rendered by award-winning translator Hedgie Choi, this is a book that will change the way you think about what a poem can accomplish.

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The Man Suit, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line—often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.

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A debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore diasporic experience.In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo (or “song form”) of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Within diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from the history of the Roma in Spain, flamenco performance, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song.

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What motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts? In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the idea of difficulty in contemporary women’s poetry. Through close engagement with recent poetry and hybrid work from women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, Darling argues that textual difficulty constitutes a provocative reversal of power, in which writers from historically marginalized groups within society can decide who is allowed into the imaginative terrain they have created. In constructing this argument, she shows the full range and artistic possibilities inherent in contemporary texts that foreground textual difficulty as an aesthetic gesture. This is powerful reading that will change how you think about contemporary poetry and its subversive possibilities.

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Berg’s hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated—drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, Dark Matter aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: “a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I.” The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations.

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These are poems that rock you like a tilt-a-whirl, off-kilter and non-stop.In this collection of poems by Joe Hall, you might find yourself laid off at a cannabis grow or vomiting gold. You might find yourself screaming in your underwear at the tech bro in the derelict arcade in your head. You might find your despair here or a gentle sign of change. Many of the poems here unearth histories in which people refuse the systems that designate them waste or wastable in hyper-compacted blocks of poetry and prose. Defiant, funny, and gentle, this book braids the panic-inducing catastrophes of now with a long view of solidarity in struggle.

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Lyrically inventive, ekphrastic poems that interrogate art, race, and humanity’s dark history.These poems stress the weight of what it means to speak from and in an already “known” world. In this debut collection from Keith Jones, the opening poems tarry with and think alongside the paintings of Cy Twombly. If Twombly is a painter of the Middle Sea, this song series conjures the longue durée of the Middle Passage. The poems then turn to resituate a “you” and “I” in a world, our world, disfigured by false and deathly approximations of the “human.” Perched on the jagged-edge of how many known and unknown catastrophes, how do we remake, rethink, reimagine, repair in language and act our relations to one another and to the earth? In the thinking and feeling of these poems, the great recursive swirling arcs of Twombly’s painterly line recur and intersect.Beyond the materiality of Twombly’s paint, beyond the materiality of the poem, we arrive at a profound place of thought, a kind of state, perhaps a republic of many worlds, alive to all our relations and how much they matter.

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Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “I” to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.

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A philosophical-minded and syntactically experimental book of poetry.The philosopher Catherine Malabou once asked: “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” There Must Be A Reason People Come Here by Brian Foley is a collection of poems that attempts to answer this question by broadcasting the indirect effects of the lived condition of a subject squeezed under the structures of late capitalism. Lines like, “Hope is a chemical, not a dream ignited in the eye / that can be heard sober.” And “There is no sun here, / just habits of light” work through the contradictions of what it means to be negatively capable. It is a collection of poems that refuses to conform to the norms of what poetry is and how it must say things.

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For Nathan Hoks, a poem is a verbal nest, a weave of various scraps and strands inside of which something incubates. In Nests In Air, he makes this definition manifest by blending research of animals’ nest making habits with poetic forms that create vivid imaginative spaces. Structured sets of four poems followed by suites of four images, the poems and images weave together, creating a nest of sorts. These poems are personal and political, social, and ecological, marked by conflict, contradiction, and uncertainty. Open the book and enter a space where “the slippery outline that haunts the soap / And the twisty timeline ghost-riding through me.”

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“The thing about killing is, like everything else, it feels as bright as love for just a flash.” The second volume in Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords series of evocative prose poetry, this is a collection that engages with dreams and a complicated and ever-evolving relationship with death. These poems bring together vivid and unexpected imagery—“a tiny light-pink fruit fly, the hot breath of a bear”—while pulling you deep into the mind of Schomburg, where thoughts like “finding a pair of scissors on the moon, or when I die, noticing my death notice me” are just part of the life that inhabits the inlets of the imagination.

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Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book. Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph’s College. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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From the co-publisher of acclaimed poetry press Omnidawn, Risk engages directly with limitations, both those that structure the literal form of the poems and literary form and those that are both unavoidable and self-inflicted.In Risk, award-winning poet Rusty Morrison uses a constraining form of seven-syllable segments with breaks between to explore questions of limitation. In these poems, she is not just writing about constraints, but living inside and seeing how to manage them. In this way, the speaker of these poems actively experiences limitations as event, not aftermath. Drawing on the idea of philosopher and critic Hélène Cixous who writes that "the border makes up the homeland, it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke," in Risk Morrison aims where the border and framings she uses offer understanding and where boundaries should be pushed against and passed

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Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea''s most established contemporary poets and critics.These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized "repetitions" chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.The poems of Lee Sumyeong''s Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee'

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Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in the belly of the whale, and in that darkness, Wail Song asks readers how deep they are willing to wade in the water with blackness. The poems of Chaun Webster assume the world is not enough and is straining through each syllable, and with the end of the world in the rearview, they demand what we might do in blackened flesh with the time that remains.

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A hybrid collection of poetry and prose, The New World follows the attempts, failures, and re-attempts at understanding and articulating an era of immense social upheaval, political corruption, and environmental consequence. In five distinct sections, the book refracts, explores and investigates these global themes through the realm of the personal and private. Old journals and notes are revisited as a way of understanding the self and its various revisions and mistakes. The New World tells the story of escapism and arrival, growth and decay, and despair and optimism as they occur, often simultaneously, within the mind of our narrator. The book asks, “How do you write poems in a country like this?”, inviting every reader to take stock of themselves, and to reassess the ways “One human world / [empties] completely / into the bigger one.”

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Opera Buffa is Tomaž Šalamun’s last testament. It is a book rooted in torn landscapes of Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Crafted from place and power, these poems are fragments of collective memory. “There are hands, inside. Concordance rises / There are no foodstuffs. There’s no branch.” These are poems that examine what is tender and terrible in the world, ranging from the extrajudicial civil massacres of partisans during and after the Second World War, to the prejudicial violence carried out in twenty-first-century Europe against people forced to migrate from the Middle East, North Africa, and India. Opera Buffa witnesses anarchical plutocracy, climate catastrophe, and so much more. “Do you feel the footsteps?/ Do you feel the approach?” This is Opera Buffa.

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Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader’s reflection—unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the “I” in both literary and daily life: “The future isn’t anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.”

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Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and

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Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened and the story collection The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Alexander Lumans (whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere), and Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic). Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Media Solutions, LLC. Issue 35 Includes: • Poetry Translation Folios with work by four 21st century female poets: emerging Korean poet Kim Yurim, translated by Megan Sungyoon; emerging Spanish poet Beatriz Miralles de Imperial, translated by Layla Benitez-James; Khazakhstani Russian-Language poet Aigerim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates; and emerging Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, translated by Gabriella Fee and Dora Malech. • New Poetry by National Book Award finalist Leslie Harrison; Kingsley Tufts Award-winner Angie Estes; Guggenheim Fellow Eric Pankey; Whiting Award-winner Joel Brouwer; Felix Pollack Prize-winner Emily Bludworth de Barrios; as well as emerging poets Ariana Benson, Chee Brossy, Dorsey Craft, Asa Drake, Anthony Immergluck, Luisa Maraadyan, Stephanie Niu, Ben Swimm, and many others. • New Fiction by recent NEA Fellow Sean Bernard and emerging writers Molly Beckwith Gutman, Chemutai Kiplagat, and Sean Madden. • New Essays by James Laughlin Prize-winner Kathryn Nuernberger and emerging essayist Despy Boutris.

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