Ends

An epic poem in miniature, Anarcadia attempts to navigate the stark disintegration of the very world from which it’s made, mapping a catastrophe that seems both on its way and already occurring. Offering a collage of collapsing fragments – whirling ‘like bitstreams / in a blizzard’ – this sequence freefalls through a landscape of freak storms and surveillance satellites, ‘bio- / metric insects’ and ‘full- / body scanner[s]’, ‘leaving nothing left / undamned’. Continuing the sleek work of the previous collections, Hand’s command of language generates a livable terrain, humming with echoes of the pastoral tradition – from Sidney to Shelley, from Geoffrey Hill to J.H. Prynne. Hand’s poetry renders ‘an animate / climate’, through which we are forced to face the debris of a system that has failed us and a planet we, in turn, have failed. Nevertheless, the poet shows us a glimpse of the future. At the heart of Anarcadia is something of a love poem, revealing beauty in the art of losing, a way to ‘Re-salvage / sylvan camouflage / out of obscure selvage’, attempting a recovery. ‘Rife with hybrid vigour’, this book confirms Dominic Hand to be a poet of singular, clear-sighted vision, unafraid to see things as they are, ‘risking / bewilderment’.
– Rowland Bagnall

William Rowe, the poet, and eminent translator of Latin American poetry from Vallejo to Raul Zurita & others presents his latest book of poems, Sixfingersafterwards, in six sections. The title word ‘afterwards’, which refers to a large part of the first section of poems takes inspiration from an Ayahuasca session. According to Freud, Afterwardness or Nachtraglichkeit as originally harmless memory can later be re-experienced as traumatic through the lens of new mature understanding. The Marxists view the capitalist state as inherently connected to a ‘death culture’ where the pursuit of profit overrides the human life, turning the system into a form of a vampirism that consumes the living labour. All the sections are written with a deep commitment, elaborating a painful truth in a remarkable open poetic sensitivity. Our language ravaged by ‘vampirism’ where ‘Language itself seemed to form death communiques.’  Other sections are about love, ‘when my daughter says she loves me very much.’  Or a section of Quechua poems translated by Rowe, which shed light on the extensive range of his writing and interconnectedness of his creativity. The poems in this collection leave nothing out of the traumatic pain from capitalism nor its ‘dark dark shine of money.

I dreamt of Rowe, reading these poems to the track called Walking on the ceiling, by the late Chicago blues guitarist, who played with six fingers. I renamed it to Walking the ceiling toward eternity, to honour the Sixfingersafterwards. A must-read!
- Ulli Freer

It is right and necessary to be speaking with strangers. There are islands, backroads and cliffs of wet inked worded sea ridgelines where aodán McCardle’s work emerges concrete and lyric as a chant of delicately provoking permutations. forbid me my love, the first part of this beautiful book, is poetry as poiesis or making. By means of a series of concrete meditations, McCardle takes us where he, or perhaps the words themselves, unknit, erase, appear and disappear. Wor(l)ds of the size of terrorist and bomb are subject to a system of alterations that end up shooting lovebombs from the page as if love could become an error in the system. The second part of the book, LllOovVee, starts closer to verse. Reading it, one can almost hear aodán’s delicate Irish voice, but any easy reading gets explosively interrupted by the scanned handwritten, scribbled and scratched lines that open another set of permutations, one about what is behind us, how to be there here and what is it to be there then now, in the making, in the ear and in the eye with this revealing poetry.
 - Martín Gubbins 

Aodán McCardle is a performance poet, artist, & tattooist. In this book he combines all three artistic expressions into a performance. These poems are audacious. A poetic trajectory worthy of reading aloud.

Dear ____,

I happened to look for a while out of “my” window on the 17th floor Palliativstation of the Wiener Allgemeinen Krankenhauses last night, where an enormous orange moon was hanging about, consorting with a lick of dark cloud, near to the tiny gaggle of skyscrapers. I didn’t have much to say for myself and so it just sort of looked back at me. 

Every day friends and well-wishers come here and as always I want to run to my room and read a book until they’ve left but for the first time in my life my room is also the room they want to visit, and so I can’t. I wrote down yesterday as best as I could the words of my last long conversation with Marina: there might be more, but the words are running away from her now, which only makes you realise how small and insignificant they are, fleeing from something (from someone) who remains exactly who they were even in their absence: like dust falling from the sun.

* 

A voyage in the insight which comes as a kiss and follows as a curse, made after you ran out of things to say.——first halting efforts at mutual understanding——love letters from twelve years ago. journal entries from fifteen years before lick at the edges like flames. Opaque coloured shadows, projected in three dimensions——of a——future that——has. never ceased to exist and which——Doesn’t——.——.——arrive to speak about their fears.—— Beginning with a naked bathroom selfie. 

An attempt to live nonjudgmentally and without fear, against the desire to be something other than who you were, as a basic form of class hatred, a fear of the common and of everything that happens there, near speechlessness, trailing off, only sometimes coming back to life again, shame dies so that everything else can be saved, and everything else remains present against the background of this absence, beneath the harsh overhead light, as you pull on the pathetic, unassuming string of the pullcord. 

Dedicated to one person, written by one another. “Poems written by / different poets / are my nakedness.”

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover. 

First Nettles collects poems written between 2021 and 2024, from precarious off-key lyrics to sprawling elegies of damaged life. A book of flailing, desperate music, hurt and hopeful, held together by pins and gaffer tape, art and courage and comradeship. Includes the sequence “Seizures” (2022) – “perfect in its openness and lyrical disfigurement” (Danny Hayward).

“[An] exhilarating collection […]. The sequences here are ferociously and admirably radical, with some superb political satire and verve to the poems.”  —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber; cover collage by Sam Keogh

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

"[…] this new poetry will not serve the taste of the prosperous class. which only represents a minority. The people who populate this earth find the right to live at the end of a constant struggle. Like everything else, they also have a right to poetry, and it will appeal to their taste."

Three friends —Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat— followed this principle as they were composing their "odd" poems. Their aim was to write poetry for everyone, about everyone.

This books gathers the poems Orhan Veli published with his friends in Odd (1941), the manifesto he wrote for this new poetry, and the foreword he wrote for the 1945 re-edition.