The Cave

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) and poet Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York's artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women.

Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolors, books and temporary monuments from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words.

Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.

In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to “color-code emotions,” she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise—a work that creates its own poetics. She sought “a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition” of her own mind and to “perform this process of translation” on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called “magnificent.”

Much like Proust’s madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi’s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the massacre by Korean government forces of hundreds of students taking part in the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artefacts commingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired in part by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a ‘magnetic field of memory’, proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Don Mee Choi draws on friendships, literature and documentary materials to elucidate the personal griefs we suffer under the assaults of empire. Formally explosive and emotionally harrowing, Mirror Nation is a riveting investigation into the coded images that fuse memories of different times and places.
— Forrest Gander

With her debut chapbook, award-winning author and curator Legacy Russell returns to poetry with her GAY POMPEII, a collection of lyric poems that begin at the end of the world.

Rising out of Russell's 2022-2023 Digital Fellowship for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the author and curator explores ash, filth, dirt, and decay, intersectional with the fetishistic mythos of Pompeii and its destruction in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives over two million visitors per year to view its archeological excavation. Russell puts the mass voyeurism, sensation, extraction, and loss of Pompeii—a devastating moment frozen in time—to work. In GAY POMPEII, the site becomes a device with which Russell unspools birth, death, genocide, visual culture, and space-time. The title of this compilation underscores the essence and demand of capitalism: to be carefree in the face of looming extinction. Russell's GAY POMPEII is a selfie taken at the edge of catastrophe and a polyphonic elegy.

Legacy Russell (born 1986 in New York City) is a curator and writer. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally.

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher