Moon Mirrored Indivisible

Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

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.

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.

In the powerful follow up to her critically acclaimed debut collection, poet and activist Fariha Róisín is writing, praying, clawing, and scratching her way out of the grips of generational trauma on the search for the freedom her mother never received and the kindness she couldn’t give.

This collection of poetry asks a kaleidoscope of Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border? Innately hopeful and resolutely strong, Fariha's voice turns to the optimism and beauty inherent in rebuilding the self, and in turn, the world that the self moves through. Ubiquitous to the human experience, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is an illuminating breath of fresh air from a powerful poetic voice.

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

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.

—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell