Sitt Marie Rose

For this collection of poems and prose, Leslie Scalapino has gathered four sequences into what she calls an “aeolotropic series.” The poems reflect each other like crystals and change like highly polished glass illuminated by a shifting light. They follow the mind from thought and observation to afterthought, reflection, and obsession.

Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, and essays, including numerous collaborations with artists, writers, and dancers. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.

Utterly magnetic, Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection The Hungering Years is a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis. “I am afraid of asking the right questions,” Farah admits. But through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan, this work finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment? Though the answers are elusive, what steps into the light is a collective of friends whose genuine care and companionship anchor these poems through their spiraling search. 

“I am always looking for Palestine, and yes, I am always looking for love,” these poems croon, holding so much of the world even as they trace an inheritance of displacement. The Hungering Years conjures startling landscapes where we may also experience what it is to be consumed by obsession, echoing with songs by Mitski, iconic scenes from Supernatural, and the sound of the Mediterranean Sea. But as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era,” anchored in “questions that keep us reaching toward life,” and questions toward each other.

Building glass structures from her questions, Farah pushes their architecture almost to breaking. Then breaking, the spirit—luminous, actualized—reveals itself through the cracks. Through the landscapes of California, Palestine, and all of the distances in between, there emerges a new sense of devotion to what is possible which might thrust us, together, “off the edge, / in love, towards God.”

With an introduction by poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Summer Farah’s debut collection The Hungering Years bubbles with language, is desirous, sensitive, and hysterically (ferociously) human. “I” is I, is mother, is the guiding wisdom of Etel Adnan, is Palestine, is the work that writes Palestine into the future, is the epistolary thread of love that holds this daring young poet’s work together. “i am an enemy of dust i am an amalgamation of everyone i have ever loved …” writes Farah, enlisting us in this vital poetry against the death cult, lush with solidarity, teeming with the futurity we need. — Wendy Xu, author of The Past

What I most adore about Summer Farah's work, and what most comes alive in The Hungering Years is that there is no such thing as an unworthy affection, nothing unworthy of close and careful attention, nothing unworthy of being pressed up against the undeserving world and becoming something greater. This is a gift and a delight, and through that gift, these poems are richly and generously populated, and teeming with beauty. — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

Summer Farah's words ease me, compel me, motivate me. Her work is agile and brilliant, her mind potent and illustrious—like air, a song, rhythmic and concise. These poems move me to my core, rupturing something deep inside of me about place, Palestine and Etel Adnan. "I memorize no language/but their voices," she writes as I memorize her words again and again, uttering gratitude that I get to be alive and read Summer's words. This book is both a spell and an oracle. — Fariha Róisín, author of Survival Takes a Wild Imagination

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

Translated from the French by the author.

“From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.” — from the Foreword by Jalal Toufic

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon's power and range. 

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon's own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon's writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. She continues to live and work in Marseille, and her writing is inseparable from the place, shaped by the vibrant community of poets and writers and artists Giraudon has herself shaped, as well as by the city's gritty and diverse cosmopolitanism. Giraudon's many books have, since 1982, been primarily published by France's P.O.L. editions. Giraudon has also been instrumental as an editor for influential reviews such as Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If. She performs and collaborates widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Delui, Jean-Jacques Viton, and many others. Two of her books ( Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh) were published in English by Sun & Moon Press in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She lives in Marseille, France.

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has twice received French Voices awards for her translations from the French, which include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Duforumantelle, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and multivalent artist. Her most recent book The Nerve Epistle appeared in 2021. Translation is one of her arts, for which she received a Griffin prize with Etel Adnan, and Best Translated Book Award, also for Adnan's Time (Nightboat, 2019). Riggs lives in Brooklyn, after many years in Paris. Author residence: Marseille, France.

An English translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” —W. G. Sebald

“In his earliest work … Handke found a way of conveying a state of mind … where words seem to come between you and the world, where nothing coheres or appears natural, and from the vantage-point of which the ease with which other people talk and go about their business seems deeply suspicious. But just as Kafka felt there were moments when, miraculously, a written sentence – even one written by himself – seemed full light, seemed to fill its own space and establish its own rhythm, and when even the whole story seemed mysteriously to stand as solidly in the world as a tree or a rock, so it has been with Handke. He has, in his later work, appeared to make a conscious effort to escape from the debilitating awareness of his own lack of authority or authenticity, and tried to write as though somehow the story were already written, had, in a sense, always been there… Repetition is the triumphant climax of his career so far…

What saves the book from the sort of sentimentality we find in John Berger’s recent work is first of all Handke’s uncanny ability to convey what it is this urge for pattern has to overcome, and secondly, his extraordinary attention to detail, historical, geographical, botanical, and linguistic. (No review can possibly convey the richness of Filip’s meditation on his brother’s two books, or Handke’s magical way with images.)

His narrative … is one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth.” —Gabriel Josipovici

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad. 

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century. 

At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips 

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki