Poetry

A thrilling and thoughtful meditation on the destablising and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of troy and Marilyn Munroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force.

Caught up in the vortex of this bellicose age, adrift on the sea of digital information and misinformation, without perspective enough to glimpse the future that is actually forming, I am finding it hard to think. Here is a book about thought right now and about how to think in a world that asks us at every level not to. Discontent? Malcontent? Sarah Wood looks at the world through Freud and fraud.

In this collection of writings, Howard Slater improvises around what Walter Benjamin could have meant by the phrase 'affective classes'. This 'messianic shard' and its possible implications leads Slater to develop a therapeutic micro-politics by way of a mourning for the Workers' Movement and a grappling with the 'becomings of capital'.

The essay 'Anomie/Bonhomie' is the keystone of this book which also features tributary texts and poems drawn from the past ten years. These supplementary texts approach such themes as exodus, species-being, surrealist precedents, poetic language and the possibilities for collective 'affective' practices to combat capitalism's colonisation of the psyche.

Selected from a sequence of 100 poems written on a long day in the summer of 2013, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck imagines writing a poem "in a confederacy of exception [...] called 'wages for tenderness and nothing else'". Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at "Texaco in ruins" or the amusement park, in a bar called Lethe, at the saddest prom in history, taking "every odd route", these poems passionately survey and survive the streets and jails of the modern-day polis,"sunbathing in Atlantis", oracles IRL.

40 pages, b&w, saddle-stitch binding.
Printed on alternating paper & vellum.
Features graphics by Nat Marcus and 14 poems on loss by M. Elizabeth Scott.

Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term.

A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

"The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism." - Julia Bosson

Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.

A set of generative texts following the genetic sequencing of DNA as the underlying structure or score for its characters.

Graphic design by Gerard Herman

The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in The Men.

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

THE APOTHECARY stems from the author's desire to remake the sentence—to let it be capacious, preposterous, convivial, and hang it from a pronoun worn like a phantom limb. Robertson wants that ghostly pronoun to reinvent itself afresh in each sentence. Looking towards the eighteenth century, sometimes through a lens occasionally borrowed from contemporary sources, the text of THE APOTHECARY is precise, intoxicating materia medica dispensed by one of Canada's most important contemporary posts at the beginning of her career with the use of florid instruments.

First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XECLOGUE is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work.

{ENTHUSIASM} is the 7th poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler. It follows highly-acclaimed collections including The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner and Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler. The book's 81 poems are intended as individual pieces in their own right, but are interlinked by subjects including battle and violence, infants and infancy, religion, economy and population, the self, modernity, and the past.

Early Tuumba Press from 1977.

Early Tuumba Press from 1982

Edited by Faride Mereb and translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig, GRENADE IN MOUTH: SOME POEMS OF MIYÓ VESTRINI introduces to Anglophone readers the work of one of the vanguard voices of Venezuelan poetry with texts that cover three decades: from the year 1960 to 1990. Critics have called Miyó Vestrini the poet of "militant death." Vestrini is known, too, as the Sylvia Plath of Venezuela, but if she is a Plath, we think she is one who would have set Ted Hughes on fire. Her poems are not soft or brooding laments. They are bricks hurled at empires, ex-lovers, and any saccharine-laced lie that parades itself as the only available truth.

SCATTER MATRIX unfolds like a map, grid tracing multiple possibilites of language and form. Here is a scale, and a sense of time, where the score offers discrete signatures: 3 and 4 line measures upon which words balance or pivot forward. The result is a cumulation, a sense of connection along the diagonal, spins and collisions, slow fades and vaporous dissolves. Abigail Child's work invites productive inquiry and rewards readerly attention, to (the means of) the production of meaning, a late 20th century witness—Erica Hunt.

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

This publication is a collection of poems written through a method called Transtexting. Transtexting explores the body’s implication in poetic production positioning the body and its movement as a listening aid, acting as a filter; a net capturing words, syntax and sounds.

241. Laura Buccieri: Songbook for a Boy Inside
240. K. Lorraine Graham: from Feed
239. Marta López-Luaces: Reminiscences of Echoes
238. Montana Ray: Mirroring
237. Yumi Dineen Shiroma: A Novel Depicting “The” “Asian” “American” “Experience”
236. Anaïs Duplan: 9 Poems/The Lovers
235. Serena J. Fox: Night Landing
234. Orchid Tierney: Blue Doors
233. Aditi Machado: This Touch
232. Iman Mersal: الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); translated by Lisa White
231. Abdellah Taïa: 99 Names
230. Javier Zamora: Revising into the Right? Form…Hopefully?
229. Aracelis Girmay: MOTHER MOTHER YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
228. Christina Barreiro, Lindsey Hoover, Fatima Lundy, Rupert McCranor, Kayla Park, Chrissy Ramkarran, Asiya Wadud, Rachael Guynn Wilson: Out-Of-Office
227. Baseera Khan: Be Careful What You Wish
226. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Alphabet of an Unknown City
225. Göksu Kunak: I thought this would

247. Sahar Muradi: A Garden Beyond My Hand
246. Diana Khoi Nguyen: Unless
245. Pamela Sneed: from Black Panther
244. Gail Scott: from Furniture Music
243. Ru (Nina) Puro: I Give You a Feeling, Sweet Jasmine, an Absence
242. Raquel Gutiérrez: There’s a Mother in my Lazy Pompadour

In this book, which begins with a love poem and is encased in sepia images of her blind ancestor standing next to an empty chair, Erica Hunt continues her rigorous and beautiful practice—unflinching, lyrical, politically astute, bodily-located, unpredictable language.

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.