Poetry

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) and J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) are two of the most original and ambitious poets of the contemporary era. Eschewing the conservativism of mainstream postwar British verse and embracing influences from America and Europe, each developed their craft through continuous correspondence and exchange as part of the febrile scene of poetical community and contestation that emerged in Cambridge in the 1960s. Their works over the following decades exhibit frequent shifts in form and style, from Prynne’s radical transformation and dispersal of the lyric tradition to Oliver’s adaptation of dream visions and medieval-inspired verse satires.

Their letters are a record of both the high stakes and playful experiments that constitute the writing lives of two singular poets determined not just to engage with modern political and social life during decades of crisis and upheaval, but to contribute through the circulation and publication of poetry to what Oliver calls “a community of political ethic.” Over the course of more than thirty years of friendship and mutual appreciation, the motivations for, and consequences of, their poems are constantly worked through, tested out, evaluated, and contradicted, always with a view to what the poetry means for the other, for the poetical communities they inhabit, and for the life of poetry itself.

This volume collects for the first time the majority of Oliver and Prynne’s correspondence, allowing new insights into the literary, political, and historical contexts of their lives and writing. An introduction, notes, and appendices provide a scholarly apparatus to situate Oliver and Prynne among the poets and publishers with whom they worked and socialized, and to identify and expand upon their frequent references to an enormous range of source material and reading matter.

“The correspondence between J. H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver is gripping and illuminating, brilliantly edited and completely absorbing. Two great poetic intelligences respond to each other’s work and to the society around them, thinking through the issues at stake in their poetic practice, their differences in approach, the different worlds they inhabit, their shared commitment to writing poetry and their admiration of each other’s work. The letters, complex as their matter can be, repay repeated reading; taken together, over a period of 33 years, they chart the context and creation of some of the most significant work in late twentieth-century poetry. This is an utterly engaging volume, and should be read by anybody interested in poetry and its place in the contemporary world.”—Ian Patterson

“For writers who welcome each other as peers, the exchange of letters is the spontaneous moment of exposure, the drawing out of selves. It is thinking in mutuality. In this thoughtfully edited and carefully, even beautifully, presented correspondence between Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, two of the preeminent poets of the ‘British Poetry Revival’ of the post-World War II generations, we witness two writers of immense gifts thinking with each other, coming alive to thought and, ultimately, a shared world or community of wish. There is life, there is death; there is grief, there is anger – and love – but always there is a seeking, an attempt to arrive at a language for our worlds. Henceforth, one cannot imagine reading the work of either Oliver or Prynne without this correspondence and all that it offers in openings onto what Oliver himself saw as ‘the poet’s full performance [which] is the whole life’s work.’ It is a glimpse into an athanor of poetic creation.”—Michael Stone-Richards

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand's poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being.

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, also published by Duke University Press, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award. Her other poetry collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand's novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award, and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto's Poet Laureate. In 2021 Brand was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction. She lives in Toronto.

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

A new tête-bêche diptych chapbook from innovative poet Cody-Rose Clevidence, DEARTH & GOD'S GREEN MIRTH discovers dark songs unseen in distant places unheard.

Careening wildly between the philosophical angst of being a human on this planet in this certain moment in human history, and barefaced, godless whimsy, the two projects in this t'teb'che diptych chapbook discard formalisms, even their own, to investigate the relationship between the space of the whole universe and god. Protoformal, DEARTH is a collection of scifi dirges for all of living things on a small contaminated planet. In God's Green Mirth the poet playfully degrades god, for fun.

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of BEAST FEAST (2014) and FLUNG/THRONE (2018), both from Ahsahta Press, LISTEN MY FRIEND, THIS IS THE DREAM I DREAMED LAST NIGHT from The Song Cave and Aux Arc / Trypt Ich from Nightboat, as well as several handsome chapbooks (flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). They live in the Arkansas Ozarks with their excellently named animals.

Desiderata is a collection of Lizzy Mercier Descloux's poetry, photos, and diaristic fragments from her visit to New York City in the winter of 1977. Only eighteen at the time, Descloux fell into the orbits of the nascent No Wave scene festering in Lower Manhattan, where she befriended Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and ZE Records founder Michel Esteban. Desideratacharts the musician's early ambitions as a writer, revealing a potent poetic voice that careens from acid-tinged social observations to outright Dadaist semantic revelry, interspersed with collages and hand-written notes. Originally composed entirely in French, this is the first time these works have ever appeared in English and this edition includes the original French facsimile bound tête-bêche with the new English translation.

Martine-Elisabeth "Lizzy" Mercier Descloux (16 December 1956 – 20 April 2004) was a French musician, singer-songwriter, composer, actress, writer and painter. She collaborated with a wide range of musicians including Wally Badarou and Chet Baker.

Emma Ramadan was initiated into the mystery of Bastet at the age of thirteen and rose to the station of High Scioness. After leaving the temple she hopped freight across the Maghreb, where she began translating esoterica carved into the boxcar walls. She has independently discovered numerous uncatalogued cave systems and varietals of nightshade tea. Her name appears on the underside of stones and in various magazines whose pages seem to turn on their own.

Translated by Emma Ramadan.
Bilingual edition: FR/ENG

My Pleasure lives in the poetic entanglements of pleasure, disgust, and agency. Silt asks: Where do we extract pleasure, and what pleasure do we find in extraction?

Irene Silt writes about power, anti-work feeling, joy, and deviance. Their essays and poems have been published in Mask Magazine, ANTIGRAVITY, Spoil, LESTE, Trou Noir, Poiesis Journal and in the Tripwire pamphlet series. They live in New York.

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.

4 poèmes-affiches, format A3, impriméx en risographie au studio Colorama (Berlin), sur papiers variés, tirage à 150 exemplaires

«GASOLINE, Apocalypse 1998», «the category is: phone sex», «zona nudista», «(fête) sentimental-e-s» : étés d'apocalypse, émojis banane, cruising transocéanique, SMS en short, sales coeurs, baraques à frissons et grand-huit sentimental... ces poèmes courent toustes ~ à genoux, à nu ou en solex ~ après la question du désir, après l'amour aussi, avec une tendre obsession

Design graphique signé Auriane Preud’homme, Enz@ Le Garrec, Roxanne Maillet & Martha Salimbeni, avec des dessins de Gaëlle Loth

Like a donkey dressed in zebra’s clothing, criticism can appear in a borrowed coat; perhaps it can even reveal itself in stolen poems. Here, among fables of donkeys, shoemakers and barricades, German angels and non-German angels, and a few lines from Emily Dickinson, the transformative possibilities of art are unfolded in the figure of labor.

Poems and Parables on the Political Utility of Art is a small book. It looks like poetry, but it is better described as a kind of criticism. Taking up some recent disqualifications of art’s political potential, it refutes them in a threefold movement: against the notion of commodification of works of art; against the act of denouncing art as always-already reified from the safe position of a pure, untouched theory; against the notions that art must either reveal our alienation, or produce immediate effects on the social sphere. Outlining art’s transformative possibilities in the figure of a certain labor, the argument is shaped among fables of donkeys, zebras from Gaza, apes from Adorno, and a particular barricade from the Paris Commune.

Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by poet, performance artist, educator, and curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, Kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted in a queer, Black, self-defined, and feminist imagination. 
 
This collection of intertextual performance acts captures the ephemeral data often lost or edited out of Kosoko’s live performances. Developed alongside their ongoing, multi-media live art project, American Chameleon, and elaborating on the artist’s unique practice of Socio-Choreological Mapping as a means to explore queer theories of the body and its "hydraulics of grief," this book offers critical-creative frames to consider the fluid identities and lifeworlds embedded inside contemporary Black America. 
 
With an introduction by editor Dahlia (Dixon) Li, and contributions by Sara Jane Bailes, mayfield brooks, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Nadine George-Graves, Nile Harris, Ima Iduozee, Lisa Jarrett, Bill T. Jones, Jennifer Kidwell, Malkia Okech, Ada M. Patterson, Tracy K. Smith, and Jillian Steinhauer. 

J. Taylor Bell’s first chapbook, Hello Cruel World, solicits the reader’s undying companionship while navigating late capitalist dystopia. These poems are a downward-facing dogma set in a world catching more on fire each day; to the blaze, they offer neither gasoline nor water. Instead, they are an elegy to barely getting by, against the arrogance of solutions, and they are extremely in favor of seeking solidarity in Outback Steakhouse’s famed Bloomin’ Onion dish.

To want to reveal; to want to reveal enough; to desire; to desire in the right way, the right amount: in her debut book, Rachel James narrates the desiring subject’s nuanced and entangled intimacies with histories of power. How, in other words, under patriarchy, against misogyny, within capitalist strictures, is knowledge shaped, contained, and transferred? Tracing traditions of theater, pedagogy, and faith, An Eros Encyclopedia offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life—a method to navigate, perceive, and relate against the illusion of separation.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

The third volume of the Wattis Institute's annual reader is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

Contributions by Gloria Anzaldua, Elvira Espejo Ajca, Erika Balsom, María Berrios, Marisol de la Cadena, Lynne Cooke, Miho Dohi, Ricki Dwyer, Silvia Federici, Tonya Foster, Phillip Greenlief, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Brian Karl, Dionne Lee, Zoe Leonard, Rosemary Mayer, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, Denise Newman, Thao Nguyen Phan, Frances Richard, Dylan Robinson, Abel Rodriguez, Oscar Santillan, Alessandra Troncone, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Ignacio Valero, Cathrine Veikos, Cecilia Vicuña, Diego Villalobos, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Carla Zaccagnini.

Populated by strangers and lovers, the living and the dead, BLUE MONDAY moves across domestic and imagined landscapes exploring the cultural phenomenon of “Blue Monday”. Folding four calendar years into one, these poems trace the seasons and an ever-shifting experience of being in the world. How light can alter the texture of things. How days may be blue elsewhere, with their own purpose.

‘With refreshing self-awareness and flecks of macabre humour, Miller plunges us into tableaux of claustrophobic domestic coupledom – its failed promises and potential for perpetual fantasy – and the mundane but beautiful minutiae of daily existence. Staggering between despair and desire, the voice of these fragments is wonderfully observant and raw.’ - Daniella Shreir

Alice Notley has consistently peopled her poetry with the voices of those around her: kids, friends, husbands, strangers, and the dead. Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley offers an array of interpretations of this technique. While not aspiring to completeness, and limiting its attention to one formal aspect of a single author's work, this poem-essay sketches relationships between intimate speech and literary language.

The first overview of the work of this seminal multi-disciplinary artist, Spit Temple collects texts and transcriptions of Vicuna's uncategorizable improvised performances, which combine singing, movement, chants, and stories. Also included are a critical introduction by Rosa Alcala, a poetic memoir by Vicuna (translated by Alcala) addressing her life in performance, and a series of response pieces from contemporary writers including Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano, and Maria Damon. 

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book forthcoming by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.

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.

Poems of militant despair written for protests, occupations, picket lines, and the back rooms of pubs.

Long recognized as a poet of radiant fury, of lament, and of refusal, Sean Bonney is a modern-day Blake whose poetry reminds us what matters. Our Death, his latest and long awaited first US collection, is full of poems of militant despair that refuse any capitulation to the worldview of the enemy. These poems wander the hinterlands of our absolutely endangered cities, chart the aftermath of the collapse of the social movements of the early part of the decade, and pay homage to the Greek anarchist poet Katerina Gogou.

Blade Pitch Control Unit is a gathering of Sean Bonney’s work in poetry between 2000-2005. It collects together all the work from his previous pamphlets that he still feels is valid, plus a number of previously unpublished pieces.

The presentation of this work in a single volume makes clear the scope of his project as a psychogeographic/historical exploration of the possibilities of political verse that would seek to obliterate the pitfalls of simple protest or the expression of easily assimilable opinions.

The work moves from psychogeographical registerings of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs at the time of the Millennium Dome, through excavations of the ghosts of millennial heresies still present in contemporary London, and into a charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective.

The events of recent history play a major role, sometimes obliquely, sometimes less so, but Bonney refuses to allow his voice to be merely an outraged commentary on contemporary woes. Instead, he presents a poetry that makes clear that the protestor is also culpable, but equally a poetry that understands that only through a registering of this position can a way out be found.

For Bonney, a poem is typically a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.

"There are phone lines to the living and others for calling the dead. TELEPHONE by Ariana Reines is a network for riveting acts of speech, and silence, and listening. I saw the play and never forgot it. The audience was lit like a switchboard by its storms of courage and mystical love."—Rachel Kushner

"TELEPHONE is an uncanny parcel of theater in which the wishes of humans to speak with the dead meet the limits or the aspirations of technology. A woman wrapped in language is deemed insane and the lonely pastness of our present walks around calling for itself. TELEPHONE is a whild and visionary piece of art that announced to me a poet who is always tearing the future open like a trapped animal—their eyes reflect us. Don't look! We mus. Bless you and love you Ariana for this great work."—Eileen Myles

"I have been WAITING FOR THIS BOOK! When I saw it in the theater every word motion fell into magic stride utterly taxing the soul with its accuracy and mystery. The next night I was at the box office with a different friend and needed to return to my job is the only thing that kept me from the theater a third night. Examine for yourself the bewitching and sometimes misshapen communicative powers of life with the poetry goddess of the stage, Ariana Reines!— CA Conrad

"TELEPHONE, the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play, probes feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon."—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Cavity examines the spatial relations between the self and the home, exploring notions of gender, motherhood, and domesticity. How do we form our identities in response to our immediate surroundings? How does the household engender a sense of identity? Is the home human? My poetics of dissent consider nontraditional forms of family, sexual identity and self-discovery, and gender roles and expectations within the home.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.