Action Books

Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman’s photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazy yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of “cryptobeauty.”

A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, and beyond. In A Drink of Red Mirror, Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim’s radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible—which is to say, visionary—vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point.

Adrenalin is Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation by Catherine Cobham comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.