Blame It On The Rain

This book emerged out of a collaborative writing project that began in 2020 in response to The 3:15 Experiment. The ‘experiment’ involved a group of poets who, every August, would write nightly at 3:15am from wherever they were. It began in 1993 with six poets (Bernadette Mayer, Danika Dinsmore, Jen Hofer, Kathleen Large, Lee Ann Brown, and Myshel Prasad) at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University, Colorado), then continued every August for 22 years, with the group growing to over 25 poets, participating from various time-zones. Four of the initial poets—Mayer, Dinsmore, Hofer, and Brown—compiled The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001), a selection of their middle-of-the-night writings between 1993-2000.

This edition builds further on this practice.

"We started thinking about a reading and writing practice that is shared but still divisible, divisible but not subtractable. The structures created by synchronicity, repetition, and temporal constraint felt generative. We found that these structures produced the conditions for another logic to emerge, a night-time logic. This night-time logic gestured to a different kind of self perhaps, a self somewhere between a waking-I and a sleeping-I, a self emerged through habit. After all, logic is just a habit.

This nightly rhythm has now become a yearly ritual: every October we’ve returned to this shared practice. As Jen Hofer says, it’s just “to see what is there. Merely what is there, merely to see.”(2) The poems in this book have been compiled from our first batch of 1:53’s. We edited them ‘together-together’—together trying to attune to each poem’s internal logic, while also trying to locate a collective voice that (we hope) textures throughout.

(Certainly) any writing idea of Bernadette’s is one worth pursuing. This book is dedicated to Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), and the certainty of possibility her work opens up to us."

on nmp.16: 
english, chicago screw, folio cover, 148 x 210 mm
first edition, edition of 115 (numbered).

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

the second poetry collection from Natalie Briggs titled ‘FLOWER ENGINE’. This collection of cinched, bright free-verse explores the passing locations of love and the slow, private operations of pain’s knocking counterweight. The book extends Briggs’ relay of concise universal suggestions, translating them through brief, intimate utility. 

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

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

By one of the most transcendent poets of this generation, a remarkable collection of prose poems that explores themes of love, pain, isolation, and connection. In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish's life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.