Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza 5th Edition

The playful, inventive, and lyrically quick poems comprising The Grimace of Eden, Now orbit the strange space halfway between Tennyson and the Metaverse, veering between the natural world and a sci-fi universe, between inner feelings and outward observations, with questions of divinity alongside domestic life, spiders, dishes, and spaceships. The roving eye of these poems wanders through spacetime carrying irreverent theologies and exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate, and awake in this weird moment in time, exposing a mixture half of awe and half of madness. 

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat Books, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (Fonograf Editions, flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). Occasionally a visiting poetry professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, they live in the Arkansas Ozarks alongside three loyal, sentient pets, and the continuous void.

In the face of utter devastation, Palestinian poets offer their words as mournful testimonies of grief and war, but also of unwavering hope and resistance despite all. In collaboration with Espace Magh, we are proud to present “GAZA, Is there life before death?”: an trilingual anthology of poems written by Fatena Al Ghorra, Hend Jouda, Nour Baaloucha and Wadah Abu Jamie, as well as Charles Ducal.

Edited by Mohamed Ikoubaân and Taha Adnan, the book consists of three parts: the Arabic poems, their French rendering, and newly translated Dutch versions. Across these languages, poetry figures as a bulwark against the degradation of humanity. The book forms a tribute to those who continue to carry out the voice of their people in spite of their occupation and annihilation.

Poëzie is een daad van verzet op een plek waar de hoop lijkt te zijn weggevaagd. Het is een blijvend bastion tegen menselijke degradatie. De Palestijnse dichters Hend Jouda, Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha en Wadah Abu Jami getuigen in hun poëzie over de oorlog op Gaza en de veerkracht van hun volk. Samen met Charles Ducal maken ze deel uit van GAZA, Is er een leven vóór de dood? Deze drietalige bloemlezing, samengesteld door Taha Adnan en Mohamed Ikoubaân, brengt hun gedichten in het Arabisch samen met vertaalde versies in het Nederlands en in het Frans.

En collaboration avec Espace Magh, Moussem présente une anthologie trilingue de poèmes écrits par les poèt·ess·es palestinien·ne·s Hend Jouda, Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha et Wadah Abu Jami, accompagné·e·s de Charles Ducal. Dans GAZA, Y a-t-il une vie avant la mort ?, iels témoignent de la guerre à Gaza et de la résilience du peuple palestinien : des poèmes devenus acte de résistance là où tout espoir semble avoir été écrasé.

De dichtbundel is gepubliceerd ter gelegenheid van het gelijknamige programma dat op 24 juni 2025 plaatsvond in Espace Magh: een avond waar poëzie werd voorgedragen als hulde, als echo van waardigheid en solidariteit. Zoals Taha Adnan aangeeft in het voorwoord: wij hebben niet de rol van spreekbuis willen spelen. Hier is het woord aan Gaza.

De gedichten in het Arabisch (Palestina) en het Frans van Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha en Hend Jouda zijn afkomstig uit het gelijknamige boek, Anthologie de la poésie Gazaoui d'Aujourd'hui, vertaald door Abdellatif Laâbi en samengesteld door Yassin Adnan (Éditions Points, 2025). De Nederlandse vertalingen uit het Arabisch zijn tot stand gekomen in samenwerking met de Onderzoeksgroep Arabistiek en Islamkunde van de KU Leuven.

Doorheen deze drie talen brengt het boek een eerbetoon aan zij die de stem van hun volk blijven uitdragen, ondanks hun bezetting en annihilatie.

Teksten:
Fatena Al Ghorra
Hend Jouda
Nour Baaloucha
Wadah Abu Jamie 
Charles Ducal
Taha Adnan

Vertalingen:
Abdellatif Laâbi
Taha Adnan
Jean-Marie Gerard
Danielle Losman et le Collectif des Traducteurs de Passa Porta
Nisrine Mbarki 
Heleen Mercelis 
Roumaisa Boulbahaim
Hanna Jacobs 
Dilara Karataş
Freya Moonen en Jade Gevers

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

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

"Que peut la poésie ?" Un recueil du poète britannique Sean Bonney, qui pratiquait une poétique militante, dont la plupart des textes proviennent de Letters against the Firmament. Ses "lettres" sont autant d'adresses à des ami.es et/ou camarades dans lesquelles il relie la situation politique britannique (conflit de classe, paupérisation et pauvreté de l'expérience quotidienne) à son vécu (la faim, la dépression, la rage) : une cosmologie radicale dans laquelle les fantômes de Thatcher et les émeutes de 2011 trouvent des échos dans le scintillement des étoiles. Ces Lettres sont accompagnées de trois autres textes : "Notes sur la poétique militante", "Notes ultérieures" et "Comètes et Barricades".