Amanda Paradise

Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.

John Wieners (1934-2002) was a founding member of the New American poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957-1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as the greatest poet of emotion of their time.

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. 

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. 

If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

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.

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

A new book by poet-activist CAConrad combining essay, memoir and (Soma)tic poetry rituals. Documenting the pervasive homophobic violence of the 1980s and the overwhelming losses of AIDS, this work is an unwavering testament to queer resilience. CA’s text forms a resounding incantation to friends and lovers lost. SIN BUG is the first book published as part of the Open Narratives series.

he wrote “I have AIDS
and kissed this wall”
X marked the spot
I wrote “I’m not afraid”
and kissed him back
wherever he is

CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. Please visit them online at CAConrad.com.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

"From this moment / and hence backwards / a visitation / echoes thru the apparent opening / to the tomb / the narrow passage is the mind's reasoning / in clarity / as she moves like a shadow / having lived her life before " — Joanne Kyger, from Places to Go (Black Sparrow, 1970)

"All processes measured as form are traceable in curved decay. Seemingly unmeasurable, unquenchable, the heart stone harbors its own native entropy. The evolution of organs is not ours to decipher. We’re drawn slanting toward the stone in helices of approaching circles. Our movements throw shadows, our bodies ring haloes." — Michael Cavuto, "Isis Theses"

"In the dual work of Isis Theses & Pyre I-V, living, death, language’s work of remembrance, place & poetic lineage all take part in shifting throughlines of recombinant forms, as a spiral spirals back on itself, changed over time. Early on, here, Cavuto writes “There is not enough wood for coffins. There is wood enough for a boat.” a Pyre then is a boat, a burning that is going somewhere, not death-as-end but as an upward & outward movement into collectively shared air, an archeology of connection. “Kyger wrote that memory is a weird dimension carried around invisibly in the ‘mind’’ Cavuto writes, in one of those moments that feels like a key, “Writing, she said, gives history back to you.” But it is not only history that Cavuto is carrying forward in these poems, it is something more spatially complex, enlivened & embodied in the dance of the words, & in the vital breakdown of the words themselves. The poems in Pyre I-V enact their answer to the question ‘what essence is left us when no words are left,’ & leave us, after the ritual process, dazzled with the true sense that something is left, something important of resonance & remembrance, in the atomized language-space; the air around the dis-integrating morphemes shimmering on the page as dissipative, potentiate sparks. —Cody-Rose Clevidence

Michael Cavuto is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. His books include Country Poems (Knife Fork Book, 2020) and Pyre (Spiral Editions, 2025). With the poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen, he publishes the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter. Along with Tessa Bolsover, he publishes hand-bound poetry books through auric press.

Pyre, Michael Cavuto. Illustrations by Astrid Terrazas. 52p, 8.5" x 6.75", hand sewn with red linen thread. Covers letterpressed on a 1963 Vandercook proof press with Strathmore Premium Grandee paper. Copy text and illustrations printed both offset and digitally on Mohawk felt paper in a first edition of 275. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke. With thanks to Vladimir Nahitchevansky and the various friends who helped assemble.

James Goodwin’s Faux Ice contains six poems: ‘Roman Street Sweeper’, ‘Technomarine’, ‘Meridian Walk’, ‘Astroturf’, ‘Star Bright Ice’, and ‘Faux Ice, or The Same as Fantasy?’ Goodwin writes:

“A constrained economy of expression is the formative approach I’ve taken with these poems. I was motivated, in my early attempts, to reproduce, as a crystallised element of black lyric expressivity, the condensed form of the grime lyric, and its invocations of blackness as a poetic description of being immersed in and by indistinction. Or aspects of the black life of poetry which do not derive their origins, causes, or relations from communicative modes of clarification in language. And so the poems in Faux Ice are oblique expressions and articulations of the ways reality is refracted by [the] questions of what is real, informing, say, the experience of seeing without being seen on the one hand and having no others on the other.”

Inheriting from eskibeat and drill and from other sources of experimental Black sociopoetics, these poems, with their dispersed and insistently plural voices, aren’t interested in building up, but in dismantling a stable subject, their icy conditions always displaced and subject to change.

“shot of this glean of jewel with the

force of a technomarine to

connect the more looks around the

pressure-encrusted, iced out skip and

lack of any protection”

JAMES GOODWIN is the author of Fleshed out For All the Corners of the Slip (the87press, 2021), and Aspects Caught in The Headspace We’re In: Composition for Friends (Face Press, 2020). He is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Pivot is an experimental, book-length poem exploring the profound act of "turning", with the Haitian Revolution as its cornerstone.

Pivot moves beyond historical narrative, scrutinizing this epochal event through its pivotal moments—critical junctures of rupture and radical reorientation. Mason Jordan masterfully employs repetition, metaphor, and other minimalist abstractions of language to delve into the visceral and conceptual mechanics of turning: a turning away from colonial subjugation, a turning towards new vocabularies of freedom, and the cyclical turning of memory. Through linguistic architectures and etymology, akin to the likes of Fred Moten, N. H. Pritchard, and M. NourbeSe Philip, Pivot examines international revolt, revolutionary fervor, and the development of Black Marxism(s) through a critical reflection on Haitian revolutionary history.