Broken Glass

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square," the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. However, the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

Several films have been made from the story, including a feature film in 2007 called Flatland. Other efforts have been short or experimental films, including one narrated by Dudley Moore and the short films Flatland: The Movie and Flatland 2: Sphereland starring Martin Sheen and Kristen Bell.

Desiderata is a collection of Lizzy Mercier Descloux's poetry, photos, and diaristic fragments from her visit to New York City in the winter of 1977. Only eighteen at the time, Descloux fell into the orbits of the nascent No Wave scene festering in Lower Manhattan, where she befriended Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and ZE Records founder Michel Esteban. Desideratacharts the musician's early ambitions as a writer, revealing a potent poetic voice that careens from acid-tinged social observations to outright Dadaist semantic revelry, interspersed with collages and hand-written notes. Originally composed entirely in French, this is the first time these works have ever appeared in English and this edition includes the original French facsimile bound tête-bêche with the new English translation.

Martine-Elisabeth "Lizzy" Mercier Descloux (16 December 1956 – 20 April 2004) was a French musician, singer-songwriter, composer, actress, writer and painter. She collaborated with a wide range of musicians including Wally Badarou and Chet Baker.

Emma Ramadan was initiated into the mystery of Bastet at the age of thirteen and rose to the station of High Scioness. After leaving the temple she hopped freight across the Maghreb, where she began translating esoterica carved into the boxcar walls. She has independently discovered numerous uncatalogued cave systems and varietals of nightshade tea. Her name appears on the underside of stones and in various magazines whose pages seem to turn on their own.

Translated by Emma Ramadan.
Bilingual edition: FR/ENG

A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

The author of eleven novels, three works of criticism, a collection of plays, and an autobiography, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) is well-known as one of the prime proponents of the New Novel, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon. Among her books are Do You Hear Them?, Martereau, Portrait of a Man Unknown, Between Life and Death, and Tropisms.

A new version of After 8 Books' first publication and bestseller: Evelyn’s adventures as a transgender masseuse in Amsterdam, back when she was a young artist, supporting herself by working in a massage salon. The texts are witty, sharp and thoughtful, reflecting a very specific community of friends and coworkers and its counterpart, the male clientele. The drawings illustrating those texts are dreamlike watercolors, perfect companions to Unintended Experience’s diaristic journey.

"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).