Search results for ""nightboat books""
Nightboat Books Sappho's Gymnasium
Nightboat Books is proud to bring back this long out-of-print ecstatic, collaborative performative work. Written and arranged in an experimental mode akin to music or choreography, these fragmented lyrics create space and resonance honoring the physical splendor of both the body and the poem. This new edition includes several new poetic sequences and an extended essay.
£12.99
Nightboat Books The Revisionist & The Astropastorals
MacArthur “genius” Douglas Crase is best known for his invocations of the American landscape and Transcendental tradition. Out of print since 1987, The Revisionist has been enough in some opinions to establish him as one of the most important poets of his generation. Its influence persists, says The Oxford Book of American Poetry, as a “formidable underground reputation.” By combining that book with Crase’s recent chapbook, The Astropastorals, Nightboat Books brings Crase’s underground reputation to a wider audience for the first time in thirty-two years.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Imagine Us, The Swarm
WINNER of the 2022 Four Quartets Prize!2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST! Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, Imagine Us, The Swarm offers seven powerful texts that form a constellation of voices, forms, and approaches to confront loneliness, silence, and death.Following the death of the poet’s father, Imagine Us, The Swarm contemplates vengeance, eschews forgiveness, and cultivates a desire for healing beyond the reaches of this present life. In this collection of essays in verse, Leung reconciles a familial history of violence and generational trauma across intersections of Asian American, queer, and gendered experiences. Moving between the past and the present, Leung imbues memories with something new to alter time and design a different future.
£12.99
Nightboat Books The Revisionist and The Astropastorals: Collected Poems
MacArthur “genius” Douglas Crase is best known for his invocations and revisions of Whitmanian transcendentalism. Out of print since 1987, his book The Revisionist has still been enough in some opinions to establish him as one of the most important poets of his generation; on its strength, says the Oxford Book of American Poetry, "rests a formidable underground reputation." Now, by combining The Revisionist with Crase's chapbook The Astropastorals in a new collection, Nightboat Books presents his formidable reputation to a wider public for the first time in thirty-two years.
£16.99
Nightboat Books but it’s a long way
Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s but it’s a long way is a peace treaty in the form of several soliloquies that, taken together, read like a death warrant or an obituary for an age that has never come. Transcribed from conversations with people of all ages living in public housing in the suburbs of Avignon, these narratives evoke itineraries between Morocco, Algeria, Albania, Spain, Mayotte, Côte d’Ivoire, and France. The result is a magisterial work, a continental chorus that articulates a confluence of humanities.
£11.99
Nightboat Books Green-Wood
In Green-Wood, the author wanders Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth-century cemetery, where the burial ground becomes a portal through which she can explore her own trauma after September 11, and uncover the historical and national traumas leading up to that event. For the author, Green-Wood becomes not only a place of death, but also survival in the midst of death. Green-Wood bears witness to the ways in which people and things are entangled with one another in vast nets of connection.
£14.10
Nightboat Books Threnody
Part lamentation, part ode, Threnody (the word originates from the Greek, threnos, “wailing” and oide “ode.”), examines the beauty and violence of our present ecological moment with a lyric and meditative eye. Concerned with the precise relationship of components in the world these poems exist in the overlap between imagination and fact, truth and history, territory and map, the living and the dead. “Juliet Patterson’s poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue—all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history.” – Jean Valentine
£12.50
Nightboat Books Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina.
£14.74
Nightboat Books Hart Island
In hart island, the poet narrator walks and works in the East Village of Manhattan navigating the day to day needs and desires of a community, an organization, a changing neighborhood, as well as her own. The poem, which begins after she discovers the existence of an appropriated, politically walled-off potter's field/prison, proposes that others are not figurative or metaphorical, but are literal, material - that alterity can be both a limit and radiance. Praise for Stacy Szymaszek: "Each poem is what I am looking for: a resonance with a particular location, an intelligence unafraid of its humanity, a sort of desperate adequacy with the people or objects that Szymaszek encounters."- Etel Adnan
£12.51
Nightboat Books Sisyphus, Outdone.
Here, Nathanaël engages the catastrophal-photographic, translative, architectural-calling to the scene a discrepant combinatory of voices including Ingeborg Bachmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Dmitri Shostakovich, to insist on the relational and seismic state of language and the image.
£13.99
Nightboat Books The Obituary
In order to traverse a city where identity is tagged by accent, Rosine, Gail Scott's part-Indigenous protagonist, performs an ever-shifting amalgam, ventriloquizing often suspect voices, both contemporaneous and ancestral. Her inability to claim a legacy becomes a trajectory of disjunctions where place, language, and race are lived through in the most detailed ways, fostering schisms that challenge what narrative has come to mean under the rubric of the "novel." Though a mystery, possibly involving murder, The Obituary is less a whodunit than an investigation of who speaks when "one" speaks.
£13.22
Nightboat Books Ante body
Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in PoetryAn incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic. Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten’s concept of “the ANTE,” Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.
£13.08
Nightboat Books On Autumn Lake: Collected Essays
On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase’s prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspiring as John Yau wrote, “the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry.” His essays, written as rhythmically as poems, take a personal rather than abstract approach, offering committed and sometimes intimate portraits of John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, and others. With generosity of spirit, Crase shares his devotion to poetry, democracy, and landscape in this handsome volume that greatly enlarges the available body of his work and will be seen as the essential complement to his collected poems.
£18.60
Nightboat Books Discipline
This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.
£12.65
Nightboat Books Your Body Figured
In Your Body Figured, Douglas A. Martin presents the reader with three prose pieces, each focused on an artist: the painter Balthus, the poet Hart Crane, and finally the Irish painter Francis Bacon as seen through his relationship with model and muse, George Dyer
£12.17
Nightboat Books The All-Purpose Magical Tent
A masterful debut collection by poet Lytton Smith, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize.
£12.28
Nightboat Books Glean: Poems
Glean, a reference to the gathering of grain after harvest, explores the appalling trust implicit in any act of faith that prayer may not elicit a response. Spare and evocative, the collection struggles with a language at odds with itself
£12.28
Nightboat Books Tender Points
Tender Points is a narrative fractured by trauma. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, chronic pain, and patriarchy through lived experience and pop culture. First published in 2015, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.
£13.29
Nightboat Books Consider the Rooster
Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively. Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.
£14.99
Nightboat Books Villainy
2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST!Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.Andrea Abi-Karam answers the call to action for poetry itself to become the radical accomplice it was destined to be in their second book, Villainy. In order to live through the grief of the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive.
£12.99
Nightboat Books A Queen in Bucks County
2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST!An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Outline of My Lover
On the fringes of the music scene in a Southern college town, a lonely young student driven to fl ee a troubled adolescence pursues and forms a life-altering relationship with an acclaimed artist-musician. Their understanding develops in a pattern of sex and reticence, soon impacting both their paths and greatly shifting expectations. Written “as if telling the truth was a matter of survival” (Andrew O’Hagan), it is a queer bildungsroman.
£11.99
Nightboat Books Rock|Salt|Stone
Rock-Salt-Stone sprays life-preserving salt through the hard realities of rocks, stones, and rockstones used as anchors, game pieces, or weapons. The manuscript travels through Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA, including cultures and varieties of English from all of those places. The poems center the experience of the outsider, whether she is an immigrant, a woman, or queer.Sometimes direct, sometimes abstract, these poems engage different structures, forms, and experiences while addressing the sharp realities of family, sexuality, and immigration.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Fleshgraphs
Haunted by on-line confessions, ranging from the trivial to the homicidal, and by a society obsessed with people changing their corporeal forms, Fleshgraphs is a multi-vocal manifesto of the body. Lyrical, experimental, satirical—these prose fragments enact a potent exploration of queerness, girlhood and illness against a backdrop of internet and rape culture.
£12.61
Nightboat Books In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy
Daniel Borzutzky, whose work Eileen Myles calls "violent, perverse, tender," offers a bracing new book that confronts violent action, from state sponsored torture and the bombing of civilians and other "non-essential personnel" to the collapse of the global economy, the barbarism of corporate greed, data fascism, and the deaths of immigrants attempting to cross borders. His book confronts the various horrors of our contemporary landscape through a poetry that literalizes violence, that seeks to find emotional connection and personal meaning in a world that is always exploding.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Ban en Banlieue
Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue follows a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, in 1979, is the axis of this startling work of overlapping arcs and varying approaches. By the end of the night, Ban moves into an incarnate and untethered presence, becoming all matter— soot, meat, diesel oil and force—as she loops the city with the energy of global weather. Derived from performances in India, England and throughout the U.S., Ban en Banlieue is written at the limit of somatic and civic aims.
£12.82
Nightboat Books Love Is Colder Than the Lake
Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon’s power and range. Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon’s own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon’s writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.
£13.99
Nightboat Books A Beauty Has Come
A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, “The Beautiful One,” comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson’s poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.
£13.99
Nightboat Books Nice: Collected Poems
Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.
£16.99
Nightboat Books Prescribee
An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Togetherness
WINNER of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureFinalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry! A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Desgraciado: (the collected letters)
A collection of epistolary poems that exorcises and explores the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory. In DESGRACIADO, Angel Dominguez navigates language and memory to illuminate the ongoing traumas of misremembered and missing histories and their lasting impacts. Dominguez unravels a critical and tender language of lived experience in letters addressed to their ancestral oppressor, Diego de Landa, (a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Maya language in Mani Yucatán, on July 12th 1562), to articulate an old rage, dreaming of a futurity beyond the wreckage and ruin of the colonial imaginary. This collection doesn't seek to heal the incurable wound of colonization so much as attempt to re-articulate a language towards recuperation.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power
WINNER of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology’s Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award! Path-breaking lesbian poet & scholar Judy Grahn returns to the stories of Inanna the Mesopotamian goddess of erotic love and justice to reimagine the contemporary world.In her trademark lusciously erotic writing, Judy Grahn illuminates eight dramatic stories exploring the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna’s power and relevance for contemporary queer feminist audiences. Psychologically rich, morally and ethically exhilarating, passionate and full of life, these stories reimagine central western myths, including the book of Job and Gilgamesh with women and queer people as central actors. In every sentence, Grahn proves how revisiting origin stories is a vital world-making activity.
£12.99
Nightboat Books Art in Time
Historically, much landscape art has reinforced binaries such as inside/outside, subject/object, and culture/nature, thus reducing a complex network to an ornament that reinforces a sense of human power over nature, imposes specific cultural values, and/or claims or exercises control. And yet there are also artists who have developed alternatives to conventional depictions of the world around them, using landscape to participate in the earth, active in its view and its viewing. The art addressed in the book presents landscape as engagement rather than as detached observation, encouraging an increased sense of belonging to, and thus responsibility for, the earth.
£13.99
Nightboat Books Birds
As Ronald Johnson wrote, William Benton’s witty and inventive Birds single-handedly resurrected the Concrete Poetry movement. First published in 1972 by the Graphic Arts Workshop of the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon, as a limited edition of 200 copies, this new edition includes an introduction by Benton as well as several new poems.
£9.99
Nightboat Books Little Million Doors
Written during an autistic breakdown after his father’s sudden death, Sweeney’s visionary elegy for the living occupies the voice of the newly dead. Through shifting identities, genderless, omnigendered, bereft and haunted, this work affords an intimate mapping of grief—and a vision of what consciousness remains after the body.
£11.99
Nightboat Books Schizophrene
Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.
£11.99
Nightboat Books Music for Porn
Taking Walt Whitman's Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern's Music for Porn moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor.
£12.99
Nightboat Books The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters
Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.
£17.07
Nightboat Books Dura
The politics and poetics of language, culture and self all collide in Myung Mi Kim s Dura, a contemporary classic of Asian American and experimental literature, brought back into print by Nightboat Books on the tenth anniversary of its orginal publication. This edition features a preface by Juliana Spahr and an afterword by Stephen Hong Sohn.
£12.07
Nightboat Books Ears
These poems crackle with aplomb and verve as they try to measure the distance between the ear, an organ of touch, and the often chaotic and sometimes orderly vibrations the ears permit the body to receive; in that gap between trust and faith is this collection of poems—a devotional book that prays to the senses for mercy. It’s tricky.
£12.61
Nightboat Books Swimming Home
Vincent Katz's new collection, his first in a decade, presents an aesthetically and emotionally diverse series of poems that attempt to tune in to particular details of the poet's life, from friends and family to larger geopolitical issues.
£13.45
Nightboat Books A Several World
As in the title phrase-borrowed from a 17th century poem by Robert Herrick-in which "several" is used to individuate, questions of singularity and the plural, of subjectivity and the collective, pervade this dream-quick poetry. In A Several World there are glimpses of an "us down here"-in the understory, in the open clearing-and, by various projections, there is frequent attainment of an aerial vantage, a post otherwise abdicated. Landscape here is spatial theater, and a choreography recruits all standalone selves: solidarity beginning in an erotics of attunement, catching likenesses. "This clever, busy, anxious, flirtatious poet, with his 'predilections for predicaments,' can connect anything to anything else." -Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review
£12.82
Nightboat Books Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star
Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star, Gracie Leavitt's first full-length collection, draws on rich lyric history, the love poem as prism, in an effort to create a postmodern pastoral. Leavitt's lines-a baroque tracery, sometimes dark, teasing prose, and pronoun-packed-and unstoppable syntax define her unique poetic vision. This idyll, with its bucolic scenery, its domestic scale, its erotic charge, charges forward into an ecofeminist future.
£12.61
Nightboat Books Fledge
This book stands for: a) a close translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit b) a mainly at arm's length appropriation of some poems by Paul Celan these being two extremes in language of c) a log of disasters d) a register of miracle e) also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love
£12.51
Nightboat Books The Sonnets
The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets-literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard's poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English "translations" includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others. In the tradition of Ezra Pound's Cathay or Jack Spicer's After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them-imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as:"THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER ... SETTING FORTH."
£14.30
Nightboat Books Love Leda
£13.26
Nightboat Books Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader
Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.
£17.07