Being Human Is an Occult Practice

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate.

Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic. These are conjuring poems; poems coming after collaboration—entanglement as conceit, as kink, as communion pleasure tactic. Smuggle in a sexy mirror, smuggle in a double-headed dildo, smuggle in a sentence then feel it read back: the author is reader is author is reader.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

Jaime Gil de Biedma is the most original and influential among the poets known as the ‘50’s Generation in Spain, and is considered the greatest Spanish poet to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. His life and literary career were bracketed almost entirely by the rise and fall of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, notorious for the suppression of literature. Born in 1929, Gil de Biedma was six years old when García Lorca was murdered in Granada at the outbreak of the Civil War, and his collected poems, Las personas del verbo, first appeared in 1975, the year Franco died. What is surprising is that Gil de Biedma was a leftist, homosexual poet from the Catalan capitol, Barcelona – all of Franco’s favorite things – who not only published books of autobiographical poetry in Spain but was known as a poet of social conscience as well as erotic lyricism. Like other Spanish poets of his time, he chose his words carefully. Gil de Biedma died of AIDS in 1990.

If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) consists of an extensive bilingual selection of Gil de Biedma’s poetry, including all of his most well-known work. The book additionally consists of a Foreword by Spencer Reece, Jaime Gil de Biedma’s short essay “I wanted to be the poem,” and two different essays on Gil de Biedma and the art of translation by James Nolan, the volume’s translator.