The Beauty of Light: An Interview

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic. 

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows.Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an "ally." Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!'s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. - Benjamin Krusling

Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha's invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

"These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. . . apparitions (nines) deserves to be read—for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out." - Lou Selfridge, Frieze

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.” - CAConrad

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

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.

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.

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