The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures

Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

"The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism." - Julia Bosson

Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim with an introduction by Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III.

Feverish from the engrossing revelatory arcs of the uncanny, Glossolalia is a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art. Marlon Hacla—who is a computer programmer as well as a poet and created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal—is a significant innovator in the Philippine poetic tradition. As Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III notes in his introduction, Hacla “eschews the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry. Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century.” This collection of relentless, densely layered prose poems is the third of Hacla’s books to be translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim.

Marlon Hacla is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).

The latest collection from prolific American poet Clark Coolidge, who has often been associated with the Language School and the New York School but has truly forged a unique style. A life-long jazz drummer, his poems can be approached as improvisational compositions with strange arrangements of words, statements, and sounds that are vibrant, frequently hilarious, and jarring. His upended syntax and surprising associations reflect a world awash in information; an advanced civilization dealing with ever more rapid change. His poems are explorations into the possibilities of language. This kind of work could, serendipitously, lead to new patterns of thinking, new definitions, new meanings, perhaps even new ways of dealing with old problems.

Poets Lee Ann Brown and Bernadette Mayer, old friends, began a specific correspondence in early 2020 with the intention of editing them into a book. The poems, letters, letter-poems, pletters, cover the first songbirds of spring, works and advice from friends, art, lists from the messy old internet, the possibility of seeing one another again, some day. Bernadette passed away on November 22, 2022, 3 weeks before this book was completed and bound. Throughout the text Lee Ann and Bernadette merge two distinct and unique voices in both a poetic, loving and humorous sharing. In a letter from Bernadette to Lee Ann she writes: “I imagine the voice to be/ yrs/ Because it is/not/mine.”

In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell'arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. Taking its title from Marguerite Porete's fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber's stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: "Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century."

The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian "working through" to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end. —CYNTHIA CRUZ

The spare poems of The Mirror of Simple Souls evoke and then draw back into shimmer. Herein, a performance that suffuses the horizon with beautiful absurdity: a shirt sewn with mirrors that reflect a strange and evanescing world-at-large, “an I where the nay was.” Drawing from film, mystical texts, commedia dell'arte, the reader finds that there “is paraphernalia of life / all over.” This paraphernalia is a kind of “segue music” for the endlessly indeterminate. The old adage claims that we can’t step into the same river twice, but Leah Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future. —ELIZABETH ROBINSON

Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover "The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.” There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform “The wounded chance / To think in public.” This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away. —PETER GIZZI

Leah Flax Barber's first book reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it. —CLAIRE DeVOOGD