The Grimace of Eden, Now

A Mouth Holds Many Things collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media.

At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? Lifting language beyond the domain of the letter, the works collected here present language in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile. Language, after all, is multi-textu(r)al, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities.

A project of the Portland-based literary-social art project, De-Canon, which creates unique spaces and experiments to center works by writers of color, this collection is edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.

A Mouth Holds Many Things was, in the short stories/poetry/anthologies category, the winner of a 2024 PubWest Book Design Award.

Full list of contributors

Stephanie Adams-Santos, Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Aya Bram, Victoria Chang, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Monica Ong, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Alley Pezanoski-Browne, Kelly Puig, Ayesha Raees, Jhani Randhawa, Paisley Rekdal, Daisuke Shen, Sasha Stiles, Sandy Tanaka, Arianne True, Addie Tsai, Vauhini Vara, Divya Victor, Anna Martine Whitehead, Kathy Wu

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

First published in 1973, two months after the military coup in Chile, Cecilia Vicuña's SABORAMI is a document of the times and the way in which history can change art. It is filled with the urgent hope that art, too, can change history. Put together when Vicuña was just twenty-five years old, the poems, paintings, and objects of SABORAMI enact a complex and multidimensional conversation. The meanings of the works (which were created over a seven year period) shifted radically after the events of September 11, 1973. Their meanings continue to shift and resonate in light of political events today. This recreation of the original SABORAMI is published with a new afterword Vicuña wrote especially for this edition.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker born in Santiago de Chile. The author of twenty books of poetry, she exhibits and performs widely in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Her multidimensional works begin as a poem, an image or a line that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance.

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

In het begin van de jaren 1970, hield Guy Rombouts een notaboekje bij waarin hij alle woorden, bijvoeglijk naamwoorden en werkwoorden bijhield die hij tegenkwam tijdens het lezen en die met elkaar verbonden waren door het voegwoord ‘en‘.

Ongeveer 50 jaar later en met de hulp van de grafische vormgever Jeroen Wille, is de transcriptie van zijn aantekeningen gepubliceerd als een boek dat gelezen kan worden in twee richtingen (en als enige boek coronaproof met twee tegelijkertijd).

Het boek bevat 2158 verzen met in totaal 4316 EN-combinaties.

De kortste verzen met evenveel letters:

A EN Z

4 EN 6

De langste verzen met evenveel letters:

ONUITSPREKELIJKHEDEN EN IMPONDERABILIA

ONEVENWICHTIGHEID EN ZELFOVERSCHATTING

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.

Oppenheim's poetry, 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980, moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, 'express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.' A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included Andér Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that 'the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.' The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.