MyOther TONGUE

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet's surface, if "words do cleave the producer from the land," then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De'Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy's poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what's different? "Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi," or "everything…that you want from women and gays." Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. "Behold me I'm you now," Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed. — Kay Gabriel

Not a Force of Nature's expertly crafted poems explore the catastrophe we live among and speak through. They form a sort of feminist manifesto addressed to all forms of resistance. But also: here are love sonnets! This book is angrily precise and always a lot of fun. "No, you're a Canadianist!" — Kevin Davies

Not a Force of Nature is the kind of book that becomes possible only after rejecting the "we" evoked so often in contemporary literary culture—sometimes said to need poetry now more than ever, sometimes called community. Amy De'Ath's motley vision of solidarity, of "actual emboldened people," is way weirder, more lively, and possible. Nor do these poems content themselves, like the ghost of Marxist theory past, with pointing towards the contradictions that surround them. Do you remember email? Sonnets? Not a Force of Nature is like that, thrashing inside generic forms and always coming next: after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, after Jane's abortion service, after the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, after Creeley, after Raworth, after Mayer, after the Xenofeminist Manifesto, after Pluto enters Aquarius. "There are still tactics like this roaming free," De'Ath writes. There are still these fervent lyric parries. Be with Not a Force of Nature now. — Stephanie Young

Through slips of verbal acuity, Amy De'Ath scrapes her way out of determinism to a world "made by hands," where our material relations are ours to make and break. History is long and history is short. History is translucent. De'Ath presents the Ferris wheel of capitalist production, where the subject lives once as worker, twice as commodity. Here, in these "concrete trousers," is a "totally liberated" working class poem turning everything into nothing as praxis. — Anahita Jamali Rad

Near, At follows the inherent strangeness of one’s consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, Near, At traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called MY CHRISTOPHER POEMS, this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be.

"Jennifer Soong’s collection displays her nuanced understanding of how the philosophical-treatise-as-poem can birth an emotional and embodied intelligence, placing her in a line of affinity with contemporary writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson and Anne Boyer. Simultaneously, Soong accomplishes something utterly unexpected in 2019: she casts a harpoon into the New England landscape poem ­– long linked to the genteel, the male, the WASP – and brings it vibrant and expansive into the twenty-first century. Certain poetry collections are written to be 'of the moment,' but a collection such as Near, At is written to give pace to those moments, with each carefully placed word a further step taken by the poet and reader together. Come near, these poems tell us, and we feel we’ll arrive at exactly the time and place we need to be."
—Mia You

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

Nazareth Hassan’s devastatingly brilliant Slow mania is a powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty. The artist begins with a photographic sequence: two white-blue sky panels; a shattered glass storefront window; a street gutter clutching leaves, smashed straw sleeves and plastic lids; then snow holding a disassembled red stained chest of drawers. These are the writer’s plinths where form as waste is configured: “smoggy breath thru burnt-edged holes tracking acid mucous inside your home.” Slow mania provokes through enumerative structures, for instance, “screening bodies” who keep a sex club’s gates open only to some: “…197 mmm maybe lemme think / 151 yes / 162 yes / 197 ok yes, but keep your shirt on.” The poet deftly folds human intimacy into interspecies metaphor: “The rat torso twitches in agreement. Across / the street, the flies continue to starve,” where “…you’re lost in your own hole: what did you find?” Hassan attends to this painful search, bearing witness to the disturbingly exultant, offering a radical state of being, in and out of which the stunning and timely Slow mania lives and thrives. — Ronaldo V. Wilson

Slow mania is resistance to resolution, it’s pointillistic magic, it’s Seurat in Bed-Stuy: the tighter you zoom, the more undifferentiated beauty you encounter. It’s kinky (the kinked-up curls of somebody’s greased-up chops). It’s tender (bruised and brown, like the overripe fruit that haunts your summer kitchen waiting to be crumbled into a crumble). The colors are blurry, the edges are soft, the stakes are high, and everything—everything!—shimmers in the space between life and afterlife. Hassan’s gaze is a hot summer steam that sneaks into the skinniest, stinkiest crevices; the grimiest seams, the most miraculous cracks. Breathe into the abyss, that’s the invitation. Take it in, let it in. Be a wit(h)ness to every single being. — Steffani Jemison

This amazing book reads like a synesthetic performance, the only thing missing is the smell of sweat, of streets, of loss. A book of choreographed pages, scores, movements, image blur, hand-scribbles. The bleak, unsparing texts hidden among the materials turn out to be the record of sudden eruptions, violent street scenes, pick-up scenes, unclear dialogues, insults, self-debasing verbal injuries on repeat. The performers are racialized, sexualized, anonymized “persons,” “meats,” numbers, lovers, passers-by, all caught up in these dangerous yet desperately emotional and triggering dances at the limit. It will leave you raw, spaced-out, both roused and alarmed as though coming out of an intoxicating show, and wanting more. — Caroline Bergvall

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.

kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil. 

kathy wu is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program.

She Will Last as Long as Stones has the inter-genre brilliance of asking where materials originate, and following that question until writing becomes a kind of listening with stone, with metal, for magnetic reverberations, for the thinking at the back of the cave.
— Bhanu Kapil

There just might be currents coursing through landscape, language, software, and labor—presences that escape extraction and will not be denied. She Will Last as Long as Stones looks into the multiple temporalities and operations of many things: material place, mining, social and scientific documentation, computation, migrant women's work, and mother-daughter relations, constellating them into a poetics of wondrous design and resonant beauty. 
— Kimberly Alidio

She Will Last as Long as Stones is a subtle circuit that conducts a charge but (paradoxically) remains open. wu's intricate parataxis offers readers fertile resistance, while simultaneously leading us to grounded revelations about the intertwined materialities of technology, language, and memory.
— Allison Parrish

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

First published in 1995, this award-winning novel is a bold, achingly honest story set in the "rat bohemia" of New York City, whose huddled masses include gay men and lesbians abandoned by their families and forced to find new bonds with one another in the wake of this loss. Navigating the currents of the city are three friends: Rita Mae, a rat exterminator; Killer, a career plant-waterer; and David, an HIV-positive writer. Together, they seek new ways to be truthful and honest about their lives as others around them avert their glances. Alternately elegiac, defiant, and funny, Rat Bohemia is an expansive novel about how one can cope with loss and heal the wounds of the past by reinventing oneself in the city.

Rat Bohemia won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named one of the "100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time" by the Publishing Triangle.

Sarah Schulman is the author of eleven previous books, including eight novels, the latest being The Child (2006). As a journalist, her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Interview. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and two American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Awards. She lives in New York.

Published 2008

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past, its ideas, its personages, its syntax, to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language, whiplike, casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage.

Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.