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Cover of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

Black Lawrence Press

When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

Enzo Silon Surin

€17.00

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

recommendations

Cover of Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings

Self-Published

Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings

Reinier Vrancken

Poetry €40.00

In ‘Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings’ a compilation of texts from the critical discourse surrounding his work, written by various authors between 2016 and 2023, serves as source material for a series of erasures.

Through retro- and introspectively reading into the works and the practice at large from poetic angles, these poems investigate the relation between art and its discourse, the words used, and their edges.

Cover of Nasleep

het balanseer

Nasleep

Çağlar Köseoğlu

Poetry €19.00

Nasleep neemt de protesten rondom het Gezi Park in 2013 als vertrekpunt en verkent gaandeweg wat er is overgebleven van dit historische moment waarin een andere wereld voor het grijpen leek. Het zijn gedichten die laveren tussen ritmische, conceptuele en kritische noise enerzijds en postrevolutionaire affecten anderzijds, tussen politise­ring enerzijds en onmacht en radeloosheid anderzijds.

Cover of Don't Call Us Dead

Graywolf Press

Don't Call Us Dead

Danez Smith

Poetry €16.00

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

Cover of OEI #80/81 The Zero Alternative

OEI editör

OEI #80/81 The Zero Alternative

Tobi Maier, Cecilia Grönberg and 1 more

Periodicals €35.00

OEI #80-81 is not an anthological publication, and has no representative ambition. It is a montage-based publication trying, in as material a way as possible, to register, prolong, transform and reflect upon energies from the work of Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows (Alberto Carneiro, Túlia Saldanha, Álvaro Lapa, Fernando Calhau, Lourdes Castro, Ana Vieira, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Melo e Castro, António Barros...).

Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows defined themselves as aesthetic operators and worked as filmmakers, photographers, curators, critics, writers, folk art researchers, multimedia artists... OEI #80-81 also gathers texts on magazines such as Poesia Experimental, Operação, Nova, A Urtiga, and Alternativa; and works by artists from younger generations such as Isabel Carvalho, Paulo Mendes and Mariana Silva, in dialogue with that of de Sousa.

Cover of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

FSB Press

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Memoir €35.00

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.