by Amy De'Ath

Not a Force of Nature
Amy De'Ath
Futurepoem - 21.00€ -

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

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything
Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Amy De'Ath, Cecilia Corrigan, Jackie Wang
Capricious - 35.00€ -  out of stock

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything is a collection of chapbooks by Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Corrigan (with illustrations by Jocelyn Spaar), Amy De’Ath, Lynne Tillman, and Jackie Wang. Each chapbook is uniquely designed with an accompanying cover by artist Nayland Blake and features new or previously uncollected works by each writer. The collection is edited by Andrew Durbin.

This box set features the following titles:

Dodie Bellamy, More Important than the Object. Cecilia Corrigan, Cream. Amy De’Ath, ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition. Lynne Tillman, In These Intemperate Times: 9 Frieze Columns. Jackie Wang, Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor who writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her methods include radical feminist revisions of canonical works. Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement of the early and mid 1980s, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Bellamy also directed the San Francisco writing lab, Small Press Traffic.  She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and California College of the Arts.

Cecilia Corrigan is a writer and performer. She recently starred in the short film Crush, which she co-wrote with director Katherine Bernard, now streaming at Dazed Magazine. She was recently selected as one of Issue Project Room’s Artists in Residence for 2016-17. Her first full-length book, Titanic, won the Plonsker Prize and the chapbook True Beige, (Trafficker Press). She is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU, writing about social media, makeup, and comedy. Her fiction and essays have been published many places including n+1, Joyland, and Nerve.

Amy De’Ath’s poetry chapbooks include Lower Parallel (Barque 2014), Caribou (Bad Press 2011), and Erec & Enide (Salt 2010). With Fred Wah, she is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press 2015). Her criticism has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Anguish Language (Archive Books 2015), and Cambridge Literary Review, and is forthcoming in After Objectvism: Reconfiguring 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics (U of Iowa P 2017). She is a PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University and lives in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her most recent collection of essaysWhat Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (2014). Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy (2006), on The Millions’ list of Best Novels So Far in the Millennium. Tillman writes frequently for artists books and catalogues, and has a bimonthly column in Frieze art magazine. In fall 2016, Semiotext(e) will publish hernew collection of fiction, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. She is currently finishing a novel, Men and Apparitions, due to be pubbed in 2017.

Jackie Wang is a writer, poet, musician, and author of Against Innocence (Semiotext(e)), as well as the zines On Being Hard Femme, Memoirs of a Queer Hapa, The Adventures of Loneberry, and The Phallic Titty Manifesto. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. Her blog, Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns, reads like a journal that explores writing as process, the personal as political.

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