Aster of Ceremonies: Poems

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic. 

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows.Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an "ally." Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!'s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Interviews with Claudia Rankine, Vigdis Hjorth, Tama Janowitz, and Walter K. Scott. Essays on Blaxploitation, the Brontë sisters, and Kevin Killian's Amazon reviews. Plus comics, poetry, and The Whitney Review's signature chorus of short-format reviews. 

Contributors include A. S. Hamrah, E. Jane, Bruce LaBruce, Oscar yi Hou, Alex Auder, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Tao Lin, Amber Later, Brad Phillips, Brandon Harris, Nicolaia Rips, Julien Ceccaldi, Linda Simpson, Michael Bullock, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Geoffrey Mak, Joseph Akel, Candystore, Taylor Lewandowski, Max Battle, and many more. 

Abolish Rent, fag/hag, Dear Dickhead, Tweakerworld, and Napalm in the Heart are among the books reviewed. Steven Phillips-Horst skewers c* ns* r*d instagram captions. Max Steele asks can masochism be gentrified? Published biannually, The Whitney Review of New Writing is a bold expansion of literary criticism. The fourth issue is about clowns, sell-outs, loneliness, and fancy.

Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including "Poem About My Rights," "Poem About Police Violence," "Free Flight," and an essay by the poet, "For the Sake of the People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us."

June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.

{ENTHUSIASM} is the 7th poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler. It follows highly-acclaimed collections including The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner and Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler. The book's 81 poems are intended as individual pieces in their own right, but are interlinked by subjects including battle and violence, infants and infancy, religion, economy and population, the self, modernity, and the past.

stewarding maps the joyful and embodied ways we can resist oppressive structures that control our food, housing, and socialisation. We begin in an abandoned school, previously the union headquarters for a coal board, which became a legal guardianship, now condemned. We witness acts of communing between human inhabitants, composting worms, microbes in fermentation, and learn working class histories along the way. Here, complex networks emerge between agents, and thrive, disrupting the monolithic power of corporate extraction. Sean Roy Parker’s debut collection of poetry is a generous account of hopeful ways to eat and ways to live.

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”