the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) and poet Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York's artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women.

Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolors, books and temporary monuments from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words.

Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, PACES THE CAGE, lifts off from their previous book, Wild Peach (2020), by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds and a musical language and tone used throughout the book helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative collection by this adventurous and endlessly exciting artist. As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking, and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators.

PACES THE CAGE extends S*an D. Henry-Smith’s interdisciplinary, improvisational listening into a poetics of “fissure and measure,” where silence and the sonic converge in boundless motion. Tuning language toward the frequencies of breath, pulse, and sociality, Henry-Smith's poems transport us from natural worlds to communal forms to Bill Gunn’s STOP, recovering wayward images and utterances to compose a surround sound of loss and renewal. What emerges is both reckoning and remedy—a lush sensitivity to the ways language becomes live, as in now, as in “eyes open, full of rage.”

–Maxe Crandall

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s reverberant propositions seek the music of mutual renewal, constantly and impatiently approaching the present. This is a field of spiraling, alliterative song, the wild signature of Henry-Smith’s lyric, that renews commitments to militancy by naming and knowing its enemies as doubtlessly as it names and knows it lovers. PACES THE CAGE considers a set of conditions—technical, material phenomena—that produce collective and contradictory imaginations and gives words to the song that makes the gathering last, “all in for all…” PACES THE CAGE is a beautiful rehearsal of attentiveness, a rigorous and generous correspondence with the edges of the frame.      

– dove, Christine Kirubi

S*an's PACES THE CAGE recalls to me Akilah Oliver’s 2004 An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. A lyrical unleashing into the many selves, the author here plays conduit for many beautiful bodies; for those souls wandering at daybreak; for the pudgy greased cheeks and those that murmur in the dew of twilight uncloaked. It is as if the poet has extracted from the marsh, the runoff, roundup and peat to stockpile and make lush a new yet familiar world. S*an has created a collection of diamonds from the salty mines of turtle tears. The divorced defanged possessive absent its apostrophe, left to the mud puddle for butterfly nuptials throughout, tells the reader: How you know me Now will be Different from how you knew me. These buoyant poems that are S*an’s latest songs have not missed the train this time. Make certain that you don’t. I’m in awe.

–LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs 

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing.