Villainy

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.

A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.

A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, "The Beautiful One," comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson's poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet's body and the world. 

In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound—words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation. 

An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa. 

Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.

David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.

David Melnick was born in Illinois in 1938 and raised in Los Angeles, educated at the University of Chicago (where he studied with Hannah Arendt) and the University of California at Berkeley. Although he spent time in France, Greece, and Spain (whence his mother's ancestors emigrated in 1492), most of his adult life was centered in San Francisco. For an author's note he once wrote, "This poet's politics are left, his sexual orientation gay, his family Jewish.... He is short, fat, and resembles Modeste Moussorgsky in face and Gertrude Stein in body type and posture." A participant in the Free Speech movement, Melnick was a key member of G.A.W.K. (Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) and an early inspiration to the Language Poets. His masterpiece, Men in Aida, began in a reading group organized by Robert Duncan. Melnick passed away in 2022, a day before his 84th birthday. 

If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet's surface, if "words do cleave the producer from the land," then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De'Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy's poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what's different? "Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi," or "everything…that you want from women and gays." Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. "Behold me I'm you now," Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed. — Kay Gabriel

Not a Force of Nature's expertly crafted poems explore the catastrophe we live among and speak through. They form a sort of feminist manifesto addressed to all forms of resistance. But also: here are love sonnets! This book is angrily precise and always a lot of fun. "No, you're a Canadianist!" — Kevin Davies

Not a Force of Nature is the kind of book that becomes possible only after rejecting the "we" evoked so often in contemporary literary culture—sometimes said to need poetry now more than ever, sometimes called community. Amy De'Ath's motley vision of solidarity, of "actual emboldened people," is way weirder, more lively, and possible. Nor do these poems content themselves, like the ghost of Marxist theory past, with pointing towards the contradictions that surround them. Do you remember email? Sonnets? Not a Force of Nature is like that, thrashing inside generic forms and always coming next: after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, after Jane's abortion service, after the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, after Creeley, after Raworth, after Mayer, after the Xenofeminist Manifesto, after Pluto enters Aquarius. "There are still tactics like this roaming free," De'Ath writes. There are still these fervent lyric parries. Be with Not a Force of Nature now. — Stephanie Young

Through slips of verbal acuity, Amy De'Ath scrapes her way out of determinism to a world "made by hands," where our material relations are ours to make and break. History is long and history is short. History is translucent. De'Ath presents the Ferris wheel of capitalist production, where the subject lives once as worker, twice as commodity. Here, in these "concrete trousers," is a "totally liberated" working class poem turning everything into nothing as praxis. — Anahita Jamali Rad

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST