Judy Grahn

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

An exciting collection of new and selected poetry by Judy Grahn. The book contains selections from Judy's entire body of poetic work from The Work of a Common Woman, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords, to new poems written between 1997 and 2008.

Judy's poetry is rangy and provocative. It has been written at the heart of so many of the important social movements of the last forty years that the proper word is foundational.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints.

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience.

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist.

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.

SERIES VI includes:

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing)

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing)

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

This long overdue anthology of New Narrative includes both classic New Narrative texts and rare supplementary materials, allowing the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to bound back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion, to form a new map of late 20th century creative rebellion.

"Gossipy and uninhibited, its breath is hot in your ear. It wants to tell you everything, and it wants you to overshare back." — M. Milks

"One of New Narrative's all-time best jokes is about the movement itself. It's the parodic motto that Bellamy formulates in Academonia for New Narrative "at its worst" "I have sex and I'm smarter than you." But "sex without fantasy," Camille Roy posits, "is nothing." The pieces compiled in Writers Who Love Too Much don't restrict fantasy. They use, as Boone says, eros, rather than facts, as the matter of narrative. Sex and fantasy are for New Narrative the stuff of ordinary life." — Jean-Thomas Trembla

Contributors include: Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Bruce Boone, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D'Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecilia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Robert Glück, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson, Laurie Weeks.

In 1967, the first books of two poets were published by small presses on opposite coasts of the USA: David Henderson's Felix of the Silent Forest and Mary Norbert Korte's Hymn to the Gentle Sun. In this essay, poet, scholar, educator, and publisher Iris Cushing looks at the context of these supposedly minor poets, and through research and conversation with Korte, Henderson, and Diane di Prima, reconstructs the role of small presses in the countercultural resistance of the late 1960s.

Iris Cushing is a poet, scholar, educator and founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press. She is the author, most recently, of THE FIRST BOOKS OF DAVID HENDERSON AND MARY NORBERT KORTE: A RESEARCH (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), and Into the Long Long Time: How Mary Korte Saved the Trees (Ink Cap Press, 2019). Her poems and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the Boston Review, Fence, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, and her poetry collection WYOMING (Furniture Press Books, 2014) won the 2013 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. She has edited three chapbooks for the Lost & Found Poetics Documents Initiative: Diane di Prima: Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working (Series VIII, 2019), Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word, and Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread and Roses (Series VI, 2016). A doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, Iris is currently at work on a biographical dissertation titled Pierce and Pine: Diane di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte and the Question of Matter and Spirit.

A Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom are pleased to announce the publication of Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker with a new introduction by poet and scholar Judy Grahn; an afterword by volume editor Julie R. Enszer, with extensive notes on the poems; photographs of Parker and a bibliography.

'In The Complete Works of Pat Parker, we have a trove of her artistic and political engagements-poetry and stories and plays and speeches; these are not separate realities. They intertwine in her now classic works, Movement in Black (1978), Womanslaughter (1978), and Jonestown & Other Madness (1985). But here too are less celebrated and uncollected works, plays especially, that show off Parker’s willingness to experiment, to push us towards more politicized realities.' - Alexis de Veaux

Included in Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker are Parker’s masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as Jonestown & other madness. Parker’s prose writing is collected in The Complete Works along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems. Editor Julie R. Enszer notes, “The breadth of creative output collected here demonstrates the seriousness of Parker’s overall work as a writer. Beginning in 1963, when she was nineteen years old, and continuing until she died in 1989, Parker took her work as a writer seriously. Gathering as much of it as possible into a single volume invites readers to take it seriously as well.”