Feeling as a foreign language

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume? 

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of autotheory offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and family. An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die. 

Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.

We can go on like that forever
building paradise from our urges
out of our fetishes our loves our vices
How lucky
We’ll wait for you then
Don’t be too long
Bookmark the page
We’ll be Here
—From “The New Heaven”

Translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

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”

The second poetry collection from artist, curator and writer Hana Pera Aoake. The book begins with a placenta placed into a Pohutukawa tree and spirals out across manifold interrogations and anecdotes of the poet’s life. the poetry harnesses a vibrant decolonial commentary on the life/death cycle:

“Bodies that span the past, present and future 
It’s non linear, omnipresent, human and non human” 

The poetry maps ways in which the lived and living memories of colonial histories are held, endured and warped inside one’s body, which is to say the whole Earth.  “Pain and age are knotted together” she states. In many ways the book attempts to illustrate a delicate symbiosis of all living and non-living things, yet localises the pain and joy which manifests from these systems within her own life. The poetry asks how ideology changes the way we love, parent and make art.

Hana Pera Aoake expands these cyclical frameworks of flux and impermanence across her otherwise diaristic and witty verse. Hana Pera Aoake writes on sculpture, anger, labor, detention, greed, genocide, the ocean, the family, sovereignty, sanity and love. The writing spares no opportunity for irony and opinion, housing articulations of political dreaming within a resilient and potent humour. The book is generous in its exploration of Māori belief systems and indigenous solidarity as much as it is on rhythmic, free-associative verse. An exciting and expansive collection of poems. 

In het begin van de jaren 1970, hield Guy Rombouts een notaboekje bij waarin hij alle woorden, bijvoeglijk naamwoorden en werkwoorden bijhield die hij tegenkwam tijdens het lezen en die met elkaar verbonden waren door het voegwoord ‘en‘.

Ongeveer 50 jaar later en met de hulp van de grafische vormgever Jeroen Wille, is de transcriptie van zijn aantekeningen gepubliceerd als een boek dat gelezen kan worden in twee richtingen (en als enige boek coronaproof met twee tegelijkertijd).

Het boek bevat 2158 verzen met in totaal 4316 EN-combinaties.

De kortste verzen met evenveel letters:

A EN Z

4 EN 6

De langste verzen met evenveel letters:

ONUITSPREKELIJKHEDEN EN IMPONDERABILIA

ONEVENWICHTIGHEID EN ZELFOVERSCHATTING

Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and CUNY Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.

Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested and imprisoned for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle in Algiers, in 1957. Algérie, capitale Alger, a collection of poems written during Gréki's imprisonment, was published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition. Algeria, Capital: Algiers makes this work available to English readers for the first time.

"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life." —André Naffis-Sahely

“Nothing happens here but everything burns.” From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with “this world of vulnerable flesh.” Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy “the war, this male ax,” invoking the future with “a trust so total / I can almost touch it.” Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to “transcribe with words what is done without them.” —Omar Berrada

"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics." —Marilyn Hacker