On Immunity: An Inoculation

In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth—and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialize, and discipline creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance. 

A buoyant melding of popular culture and literary criticism, The Slicks is a captivating and unexpected assessment of two iconic female artists by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

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.

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”

L’or et la cocaïne sont les deux matériaux bruts de Mon musée de la Cocaïne. C’est au cours de leur transformation et raffinement que ces deux substances ramènent avec elles une histoire de l’oppression et de l’esclavage.

Dans ce livre, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig prend comme point de départ la proposition de bâtir un musée de la Cocaïne (qui serait l’image reflétée du musée de l’Or de la Banque de la République à Bogotá) et dresse un portrait sans concession de la vie des mineurs afro-colombiens aspirés dans le monde dangereux de la production de cocaïne au fin fond de la forêt tropicale, sur la côte pacifique de la Colombie. Il décrit la violence, la pauvreté, mais aussi les croyances qui surgissent des marais envahis de mangroves et des rivières tropicales qui, pendant plus de cinq cent ans, ont attiré, ruiné et décontenancé Amérindiens, orpailleurs, conquistadors et pirates, esclaves africains, ingénieurs russes et guérilleros marxistes.

Mon musée de la Cocaïne se présente comme un assemblage éclectique d’histoires et d’anecdotes, présenté comme autant de salles d’un hypothétique musée de la Cocaïne, au sein desquelles le lecteur est invité à déambuler, en croisant des références qui vont de Charles Dickens à Franz Kafka en passant par la poésie de Seamus Heaney.

From the author of Confessions of the Fox comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed gives an unrepentant account of all her failures—including her child. 

“Jordy Rosenberg might be one of our most fearless living novelists. There are no half-measures in his work, just big ideas and living characters and gorgeous sentences and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise. Night Night Fawn is extraordinary.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House 

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenberg is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. She has opinions about her smutty late husband, her career as the receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon, her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser, and her failed aspirations to be a film noir actress. But what she really wants to talk about are unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Zionism, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara finds herself in a nightmare from which she cannot escape, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates—or are they avenging nemeses?—once again. 

Part novel, part someone’s mother’s unauthorized memoir—all diatribe, gutter schtick, and deranged manifesto, Night Night Fawn is a ferociously candid account of intergenerational conflict.

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

The reception of art and performance is changing.

Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling.

Charting recent trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’ these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error and crisis.

The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped orientate us through these discussions. The book which is the outcome consists of seven original contributions by poets and theorists which attempt to move toward new political interventions in culture and beyond ‘crisis as a way of life’.