Poetry, or else...

In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.

“I wanna ____ all my friends at once”: how would you complete the lyric Arthur Russell wrote for “Go Bang”? In Rainer Diana Hamilton’s hands, “smell” or “touch”—or “talk to,” for Hamilton a near-synonym for “love”—might be more appropriate than Russell’s “see.” Or maybe they’ll have argued us into believing that yet a different faculty counts among the senses, in these poem-essays that swerve from memory to love letter to argument. A narrative of lost and developed capacities, a felt history of class antagonism, a treatise masquerading as a flower, a flower in every organ—Lilacs is rude with ambition, underneath its abundant charm.” —Kay Gabriel

“Every new poem by Rainer Diana Hamilton is a gift in which poetry is made new again.” —Andrew Durbin

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk given by the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the early 1980s, in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on intensive literary and musical studies, and shaped by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy, Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.”

The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.

Edited and translated by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Phil Baber.

Winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Awards Creative Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.

In this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.

In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.

Lotte L.S.’s ‘selected poems’ (the scare quotes and lower case are important), which begin and end with standardised gaps produced by hitting the tab key with prefabricated empty space symbolising other gaps produced by other textual means, also associates those standardised gaps, these absences, wit acts of what she calls ‘seeing’, meaning seeing as self-seeing; a seeing that is often impossible to distinguish from blindness. The second line of her book ‘she could not see to see’, is modified by its last: ‘o         I am so thankful for the seeing’; and the rhyme across distance upholds, if only just, a transitio in grammatical person, a transition in grammar that may also be, or that may represent, though these verbs too are contested—‘she went (an unconvincin verb: went)’—that may also be or represent a transition in experienced subjecthood The suggestion anyway is of development, passage, narrative; of motion towards completion; though the development is no way self-explanatory, and it is punctuated by double takes.
— from Danny Hayward's Preface: A note on Ends

IONE is a Dream Keeper: a facilitator of dreams. Sharing this intimate part of our being, she believes, can be the start of new ways of being with one another. 

Exploring the reality of the dream and the dream of reality over many decades has led IONE to appreciate the quantum nature of dreams. Weaving science and dream traditions from around the world together with her own memories and the dreams of her friends and community members, Quantum Dreaming shows that as we start practising awareness, our consciousness also deepens.

IONE and Pauline Oliveros’s shared vision of a harmonious, self-sustaining network of artists and dreamers led to the founding of the Deep Listening Institute. Quantum Dreaming similarly seeks a radical shift in our collective consciousness, across all states of dreaming and waking.

Afterword by Sarah Shin
Images by Sammy Lee