Don't Leave Me This Way

A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.

“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.

A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm - one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She's the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat Books, 2022).

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices. 

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring "possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity."

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic.

As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Cook’s work channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.

Lauren Cook is a transsexual naturalist and the author of I Love Shopping (Glo Worm Press, 2019). He is from upstate New York.

In this debut collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. They are the author of Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Their poem "For a Burial Free of Sharks" won the 2016 Gigantic Sequins poetry contest judged by Lucas De Lima. Xandria is the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press, and a teaching artist for Winter Tangerine's NYC workshops. Their work is featured or forthcoming from Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, West Branch, and elsewhere.

From its situation in Ancient Greece through the various rewritings and commentaries and interventions of the last 2500 years, there is certainly no book being transmitted in the anything-but-unbroken and often comic transmission of The Phaenomena, a long didactic poem enumerating the constellations and their movement through the skies. There is certainly no origin apparent in such a transmission, even as the layers of compaction that this text attempts to unfold are themselves arguments about origin, plaintive debates about the irresolvable contradiction of a “first copier.” But what does it mean to give up the constellation, the relation, the durability that relation promises to guarantee, without being able to retreat into the security of origin or determinate meaning? What do you do then? This is to rephrase the question: what do we – “we,” obstinately – fail to see when we see the shapes of the stars so well?

Thee Display is a collection of poems written during an engagement with this ongoing transmission. It is a book about this, and a book about the horizon of communism, and a book about transition, and a book about a companionship characterized by a weird and sad kind of cheer.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. Thee Display is her third book of poetry - she is also the author of Presence Detection System, from Hiding Press (2019), and Life Experience Coolant, from Bookthug (2013). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

A dreamy and experimental portrait of young Black artists in the 1990s London underground scene, whose existence is threatened by the rise of state surveillance.

Twentysomething and restless, Skye flits between cities and stagnant relationships until she meets Scottie, a disarming and disheveled British traveler, and Pieces, an enigmatic artist living in New York. The three recognize each other as kindred spirits—Black, punk, whimsical, revolutionary—and fall in together, leading Skye on an unlikely adventure across the Atlantic. They live a glorious, subterranean existence in 1990s London: making multimedia art, throwing drug-fueled parties, and eking out a living by busking in Tube stations, until their existence is jeopardized by the rise of CCTV and policing.

In fluid and unrelenting prose, Jamika Ajalon's debut novel explores youth, poetry, and what it means to come terms with queerness. Skye Papers is an imaginative, episodic group portrait of a transatlantic art scene spearheaded by people of color—and of the fraught, dystopian reality of increasing state surveillance.

Avec les poèmes et traductions de: Pierre Escot, Marine Forestier, Adrien Lafille, Alexis Aurdren, Maud Joiret.

Édition: Thomas Le Goff, Emmanuel Régniez, Tomas Sidoli.

Les éditions du quelconque se divisent en deux projets, une maison d'édition (à venir) et une revue, Un Rectangle Quelconque. Cette dernière, chaque semestre, propose de découvrir des auteurs de poésie venant de tous horizons géographiques et esthétiques. La maison d'édition, elle, sera l'occasion de présenter aux lecteurs francophones des nouvelles voix de la poésie actuelle.