A Drink of Red Mirror

Adrenalin is Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation by Catherine Cobham comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.

‘I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.’

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in’. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death – how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural ‘you’ speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with ‘Face of Rhythm’, a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

Kim Hyesoon is an iconic figure in feminist poetry. In her new collection, she depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an ‘I-do-bird-sequence’. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)
2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.