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Cover of Hard Drive

Carcanet Press

Hard Drive

Paul Stephenson

€15.00

When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often surprised by grief in the oddest corners, the poet takes us through rooms, routines, and rituals of bereavement, the memory of love, a shared life and separation. A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints, Stephenson has written a remarkable first book, moving and, despite everything, a hopeful record of a gay relationship. It is also a landmark elegy collection.

Paul Stephenson studied modern languages and linguistics. He has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). In 2013/14 he took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and the Aldeburgh Eight, before completing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with the Manchester Writing School. In 2018 he co-edited the ‘Europe’ issue of Magma (70) and currently co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. He is a university teacher and researcher, and lives between Cambridge and Brussels.

Published in 2023 ┊ 132 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of The Men

Book*hug Press

The Men

Lisa Robertson

Poetry €16.00

The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in The Men.

Cover of Timothée Trouche, Marteau piqueur

Phenicusa Press

Timothée Trouche, Marteau piqueur

Timothée Trouche, Marteau piqueur

Poetry €12.00

Encre verte pour tableaux noirs. Vingt-sept poèmes de Timothée Trouche (maître d’hôtel et instituteur) compilés avec la complicité de Teddy Coste (groom et solitaire).

Cover of Local Woman

Nightboat Books

Local Woman

Jzl Jmz

Poetry €18.00

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

Cover of The Wedding Dress

University of California Press

The Wedding Dress

Fanny Howe

Non-fiction €28.00

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century—she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.

Whether discussing Simone Weil, Gertrude Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

Cover of The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected Poems

World Poetry Books

The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected Poems

Meret Oppenheim

Poetry €20.00

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.

Oppenheim's poetry, 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980, moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, 'express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.' A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included Andér Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that 'the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.' The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.