Search results for ""black ocean""

The follow-up to Swamp Isthmus, and the fourth book in the No Volta pentalogy, Meadow Slasher is a powerful and engaging split from Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s earlier work. All of the books in the pentalogy are connected through shared ideas, stories, characters, and settings, but they are also independent and unique in their voice and approach. Meadow Slasher is a meditation on violence and self, and it maps out the intensity of a break down, navigating a shadowy terrain of loss, dread, fear, and exuberance. Drawn from a place of questioning, the end result are poems that are eerie dialogic and unlike anything you’ve encountered from Wilkinson before.

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In Zachary Schomburg’s own words, Pulver Maar is “is a collection of poems written between 2014 and 2018. Some of the poems are long, and some of them are short.” These are every bit the poems you’ve come to dream of, long for, and expect from Schomburg, where clouds fall in love and Bob the Buoy bobs in the center of the sea. They are playful but not all play; they carry a humanity and an acute awareness of what it is to try to make a life, whether you’re a mountain or dust or just a human.

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A house echoes with the footfalls of wild men running behind the walls in S. Whitney Holmes’s debut collection, Room Where I Get What I Want. Here in the house that is not a house, Holmes destabilizes the architectural structure by relishing in the details: a German man builds a mnemonic castle, a hero swallows a tulip bulb, and a woman opens a book to place in its hollowed center a gun. Debating space and intimacy, power and pleasure, Holmes constructs a spellbinding education as erotically charged as it is dangerous.

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Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates inseparable. In this broken, scattered world that still finds a way to be playful and imploring, there is no respite in the trees and streams and no turning back on nostalgia for either nature or the city. Though the second installment of the larger pentalogy, Swamp Isthmus stands alone, archiving and organizing, rehearsing words to hold in the mouth for just that moment.

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Henriksen opens Ordinary Sun by insisting that “an eye is not enough.” Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty—rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels… Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate.

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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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In this first full-length English-language translation of the work of Helena Boberg, we are powerfully confronted with what she has called “a creative testimony that points out patterns of injustice, sexism, and violence” in the society we inhabit. A book-length poem, Sense Violence hinges on the dichotomy of a masculine will to power and a call to action for a feminine collective to confront it on all corners—from mythologies to cultural tropes and ingrained hierarchies. Translated by Johannes Göransson, the English edition faithfully captures Boberg’s wordplay and linguistic richness bringing this urgent and uniquely-voiced work to a new audience.

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Dandelion fences, twine wires, shoebox roses: Savich’s fanciful, stark meditations showcase the momentary and the momentous.Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet''s latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an "ethics of deciding to see." Momently stays alert to "the language you can stand when you can''t stand language," cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us "here, where not even ruin lasts."

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The debut full-length poetry collection from Brian Foley, The Constitution boldly disrupts and troubles the beliefs we take for granted about ourselves and the rights we hold as true. While investigating ideas of home, love, morality, and loss, the poems also reflect back upon themselves, offering “amendments,” that question and rethink the poems that precede them. Taken together, the poems of The Constitution reveal the instability and flux of the principles we use as the foundation of our selves.

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Joe Hall is a devout poet. He is devoted to trailer parks, the drafty inner spaces of domesticity where we cry out for our lady help. He finds god, saints, saviors, in spiders in a woodpile. For Hall, poetry cannot hold anything if it doesn’t break. Here, god is amputated from the ground, and the ground is opening its devouring mouth. The Devotional Poems is a prayer—a prayer by evangelical AM radio, oxycodone addiction, white pines, and the death of everything the body knows through sickness. A prayer written while walking along a state road and down into a ravine day after day. These poems ask to be your sustaining and poisonous vegetation. Pay your devotion here.

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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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In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and ‘naughty, unwomanly” language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful. This skillful translation from Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, brings the full playfulness and intelligence of Kim’s lyricism to English-language readers.

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Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine. Kim Kyung Ju's poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: "the living are born in the dead people's world, and the dead are born in the living." Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE WORLD is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement. Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim's poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today.

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Zach Savich's fourth book of poetry, Century Swept Brutal, offers a rapt and restless meditation on what Oppen called “the world, weather-swept with which / one shares the century.” In a landscape of on-ramps, mysterious lakes, disgraced social studies teachers, and signs blazing between “hot” and “dog,” these poems seek out their country’s real name while exiled within it. Century Swept Brutal presents the lyrical intelligence and singular observations we have come to expect from Savich's work—but here they carry the strange complexity of fake blood made of real saliva.

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Dominic Mallary was the punk rock Renaissance man. A successful musician, artist, and poet; he remained true to a deeply ingrained DIY ethos up until his untimely death on stage in 2008 at the age of 24. Destroyer of Man is as much a product of Mallary’s uncompromising lifestyle as it is the manifestation of his life’s work.A combination of poems published during Mallary’s lifetime alongside poems posthumously selected by friends, Destroyer of Man reveals a fiercely aware young poet writing from a place of anger and beauty with a lyrical virtuosity that is free from censorship. Drawing on a long and varied tradition, Mallary is equal parts Hart Crane and Rimbaud. Arresting, raw, clever, and unexpectedly moving, these poems tear away at the world in a relentless pursuit for liberation from the ugly and mundane. Ultimately, Mallary finds that freedom not at the core of humanity, but in the ashes we leave behind.

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The poems of The Moon’s Jaw are a portrait of rotting decadence: wastelands of body and soul radioactive with death, cruelty, and a dark gleaming perverse sexuality. The language, flow, and rhythms of Rauan Klassnik’s second collection seem to revel in themselves, stagnate, bog down, wallow. As Klassnik writes, “There’s no way out but we don’t stop trying” and here, we find a wasteland spectrum, from a playground, a twisted eden that lurches forward—despite a swollen turgid gravity of blurred gender and godlessness and wheel-spinning ruts—to an obsessive and persistently striving narrative of death, gender, corruption, and (anti)religion.

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Objects for a Fog Death is a series of odes to images and objects, and to the “you” responsible for distancing these images and objects from mortal relationships. With this distance comes a profound desire and a heightening awareness of earthly proximity. Through the accompanying hypnagogic verses, oceans quiet the voice while disorientation hurls it into a temporary place—hovering overhead or shying away in the murk. Is a river an object? Is fog an object? Or for that matter, is fog a place? Behind this book lies a call for rescue from confinement and immobility, from the ineffability of touch. Out of this fog springs forth the coeval shriek of something that will not be reduced to love.

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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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Lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a four-year period on tour and after losing loved ones and peers to overdose, Dupuis funneled complicated grief into harm reduction advocacy, working to fundraise for and distribute overdose prevention resources in venues internationally.The slick performativity of pop, punk humor, electronic glitch and sampling, and the surprising leaps of improvisation influence these poems, but beyond music, these poems are informed by Dupuis’s larger concerns about justice and organizing. Cry Perfume is a hopeful but realistic inventory of the virtues and evils that emerge when arts and tech collide. Those dualities are cloaked in the same sparkling fragrance, and there are twinned pleasures and regrets in parting the smokescreen.

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In Matt Henriken’s stirring follow-up to his debut, Ordinary Sun, he writes with an uninhibited resolve to explore intimate, everyday struggles and capture their reality in amber. Brokenness, anger, and the light of innocence power the poems of The Absence of Knowing. Meanwhile, a new beginning is captured in raw, smoldering, and cathartic expression, leaving an aftermath of aria despite discordant events.

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Whittling a New Face in the Dark is a call to arms for language to rise above its inadequacy. DJ Dolack’s poems are born from moments we must work hard to forget: the child’s first funeral dirge; an empty, fluorescent-lit gas station in winter; at the bar, two drinks too far, ashamed and yet too aware of our surroundings. The speakers in this debut collection live in fear that the intimacy of solitude is indeed pornographic. Meanwhile, Dolack’s lines are laced with a macabre, needle-sharp humor offering hymns of affliction, loss, and light: no matter the darkness, the pearl-handled whittling knife moves to do its job.

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With contributions from twenty-three poets, three engineers, and over thirty musicians, Pink Thunder presents a musical and lyrical experiment by award-winning songwriter / composer Michael Zapruder, to see what happens when poems are sung instead of spoken. Potent with weird, funny, and singular possibilities, Pink Thunder's playful and startling songs take their form entirely from the shape of the poems from which they are made. The result is a collection of musical readings both compelling and surprising. You are invited to listen. This full-color hardcover book reproduces the poems in lush hand-lettered versions illuminated by Arrington de Dionyso. It also contains an artist’s statement by Michael Zapruder and an introduction by Scott Pinkmountain. In addition, it comes with a CD containing twenty-two tracks. The book also features photographs from the recording sessions and the Wave Poetry Bus Tour. A one-of-a-kind project with a unique design to match, Pink Thunder will undoubtedly change the way you both think about and experience poetry and music. Contributing poets include: Joshua Beckman, David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Bob Hicok, Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Anthony McCann, Valzhyna Mort, Hoa Nguyen, Sierra Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, Travis Nichols, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe Wenderoth, Dara Weir, and Matthew Zapruder.

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In the poems of Feng Chen’s darkly spellbinding debut collection, Butcher’s Tree, the page evokes and provokes legendary creatures, kills them and puts on their skin—then cures the meat. This startling and unusual book is a medium that channels damned and contaminated creatures such as Grendel, Wukong, and Prometheus. It reconsiders what it means to construct a myth; to mold around a hollow space a materiality of shape that depends on contours without content. Life that has no life. These are love poems whose monstrous repetition demystifies these once powerful beings while at the same time plunging deeper into insensible consciousness, where the human ceases to retain its proper form.

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What started as the angry scribblings of a caterer in Florida evolved into much more as the infamous Al-Qaeda soon became Scott Creney's closest confidante in this accidental memoir of letters to the world’s most notorious terror organization. Scott lived in Florida in 2004 and worked as a caterer. In a world where nothing seemed to make sense anymore, and even television seemed like another hostile face of humanity, Scott began writing to someone whom he imagined was as bitter and confused as he: Al-Qaeda. Alone, in debt and utterly broke, Scott's day-to-day struggles to stay afloat, both financially and mentally, are a fascinating look at America from an outsider’s perspective. Through engaging and at times disarmingly beautiful prose, Scott represents the voice of a new class of Americans—college-educated, but in debt and often unemployed. He is a member of an emerging generation of Americans who are worse-off than their parents, and who are struggling just to clear the poverty line. He puts his finger on the pulse of what it means to be an American, and how confused those meanings have become to all of us.

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A Colorado resident himself, Hudson has compiled 10 stories from 10 of the state’s most invigorating contemporary voices. Known for years as a haven for writers and intellectuals, Colorado boasts a great mixture of talent and perspective. This book was designed to showcase the rich writing talent located in the state, and the selected stories highlight a variety of short fiction formats. The anthologized authors range from Chris Ransick, winner of the 2005 Colorado Authors League Award for Fiction and 2003 Colorado Book Award for Poetry, to Alison Flowers, a recent graduate of Regis University's undergraduate degree program.

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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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The penultimate work from renowned Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, Andes was written less than three years before his death in 2014. Together, the poems of Andes are an exceptional and unusual journey that confronts both life and death across diverse continents, peoples, cities, languages, and histories. In his eulogy for Šalamun, the Slovene poet Miklavž Komelj said: “Šalamun achieved this highest level, where the real question regarding his poetry isn’t what someone thinks of it, or if someone likes it or not, but solely, if we are able to endure it or not.” Like life and the human condition itself, these poems are at times challenging but also absurd, celebratory, and ecstatic—and completely worth it. Translators Jeffrey Young and Katarina Vladimirov Young worked closely with Šalamun before his death and render here a translation absolutely faithful to his voice and intention.

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The Next Monsters navigates the cobbles of human monsterness. The image of a white horse in the road produces a sense of human belonging, while a domestic dispute fractures that calm, exposing a new monster. These poetic mini-essays churn with violence and love, healing and torture—one always eclipsing the other—and offer challenges to the limitations of identity. The Next Monsters embraces the alienation, imagination, and catharsis that scaffold the self.

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By day, Feng Sun Chen works at a nursing home in Minneapolis, by night she creates biting poetry like that found in her much-talked about first book, Butcher’s Tree. In her second collection, The 8th House, Chen peels away the exterior of life’s pink underbelly page by page, smelling the meaning in a mother’s stew, carving light from holy grit, dissecting the surging waves of longing and love. These voices occupy the astrological 8th House, a house known for its healers and perversions, ruled by Pluto, where sex, death, and rebirth intersect and consume one another. Continuing to slice away at the distinctions between self and other, animal and human, male and female, the speaker of these poems “exposes by being exposed.”

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As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In Fjords, Schomburg inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this.

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