Dept. of Posthumous Letters

ribbon-wrapped, double chapbook / $20

Poetry by Dot Devota & Caitie Moore

artwork by Brandon Shimoda

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In Dept of Posthumous Letters, Dot Devota and Caitie Moore conduct an epistolary exchange that subverts the logic of the dialogic. “In a letter you cannot listen. You must always be speaking,” writes Devota, as her letters to Moore narrate anecdotes that read like overheard myths—webs of observation, reversal and misunderstanding that signal the presence of an attentive listener. Line drawings by Brandon Shimoda intensify the enchantment that unfolds out of Moore and Devota’s voices. “Have you ever played this game: Horse/Muffin/Bird?” Moore asks Devota. Intelligently-framed questions ranging from philosophical to purely affectionate interlace these poems like veins of honey. “It’s a proportion thing, an order thing. I am, certainly, no part Muffin.”

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The poet Dot Devota is the author of And The Girls Worried Terribly (Noemi Press) and The Division of Labor (Rescue Press). Her chapbooks include The Eternal Wall (BookThug) and MW: A Field Guide To The Midwest (Editions19\). She lives in the desert.

Caitie Moore’s writing can be found online at Harriet, BOMB, Queen Mobs, in her chapbook Wife (Argos Books, 2014), The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race and the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015) and various scattered publications.

(Book design by Isabelle Sawtelle / BankerWessel)

Elegy with Pilot Light

By Nina Puro

HAND-BOUND, Letterpressed CHAPBOOK/ $10

In Nina Puro’s Elegy with Pilot Light, memory lives in the body’s soft container. Whatever the distance–a phone line, a vomit bag, a storefront lit with our reflections staring back–these moments burn at us. Puro puts the mirror up to our ugliness, rubs it in our gums. “you know how/when numb fingers/ get inside/ they burn?/ think of me as that/ feeling.” Maybe to become smaller–to disappear–is the ultimate resistance.
–Alexis Pope

Nina Puro’s writing is in Jubliat, Guernica, the PEN/ America Poetry Series, & others. Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House, winner of the 2017 New Issues Poetry Prize, will be published in 2018. They are a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Syracuse University (MFA, 2012), Brooklyn Community Pride Foundation, Deming Fund, Wurlitzer Foundation, Saltonstall Foundation, & others. Currently pursuing a Masters in Social Work from NYU, they provide psychotherapy and advocacy to sex workers and ​victims of human trafficking in NYC.

Lunar Flare

by Levi Rubeck

Hand-bound, Die-cut Chapbook

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Levi Rubeck’s poems teem with tiny surrealisms, utterances that appear with the calm of logic and the twang of dream: “Rabies is the fairy godmother of my friendly ghost,” he writes, and “the parasite of my parasite is my friend.” The three long  poems in Lunar Flare make a particularly 21st-century, self-interrogatory weave of image and diction that is Western and deliciously, embarrassingly suburban: “I’m better with a grand slam breakfast in me.” The texture of this weave is rough with Rubeck’s singular wit –”Headstones are teeth in the gums of North Dakota” – and with lines that could have walked straight out of an after-hours bar in a one-horse Prairie village: “I know a lunatic who walked towards doubt.”

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Levi Rubeck is a poet and critic from Wyoming, though his day job is at the MIT Press in Cambridge, MA. His poems have appeared in No, Dear, Maggy, Window Cat Press, Wreck Park, Analog, and elsewhere. He was an editor at NYU’s Washington Square Review, is a co-editor at the online journal Paperbag, and writes on games for Kill Screen. More info can be found at dangerhazzard.com.

Symphony No. 2

by Emily Carlson

hand-bound, foil-stamped chapbook

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“Remember, your obligation is not to a place but to a life”: these are the words poet Suzanne Gardinier offers Emily Carlson at the outset of the journey traced in Symphony No. 2. Amazingly, Carlson keeps her promises to both place and life in these poems, which document the poet’s lived experience of the July 2006 invasion of Beruit, Lebanon by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Carlson’s breathless telling of “the story” deftly manages a multi-modal, sound-rich syntax, one which reflects urgency while making room for real beauty:”I’m a frayed knot, me, ten million times,” she writes, letting us feel how language can work when its stakes are at their highest.

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Emily Carlson lives with her partner and their child in an intentional community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Aufgabe, Bloom, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, Slope, Whiskey & Fox, The Harp & Altar Anthology and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a travel grant from the Syria-Lebanon Nationality Room at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellowship at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger poets, and a prize from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches reading and writing courses that incorporate mindfulness practices and anti-racism education. Emily earned a BA at Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. With friends, she runs the Bonfire Reading Series.

]]> http://argosbooks.org/?feed=rss2&p=2455 0 http://argosbooks.org/?p=311 http://argosbooks.org/?p=311#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2015 00:40:01 +0000 Elizabeth Clark Wessel http://argosbooks.org/?p=311

Catacombs

by Safiya Sinclair

Essay & Poetry/ $15

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Safiya Sinclair has published poems in the Caribbean publications The Jamaica Observer Literary Arts Magazine, Bearing Witness 2003: A Collection of the Year’s Best Fiction and Poetry and the international anthology Kunapipi: A Journal of Post-Colonial Literature. Sinclair, a graduate of Bennington College, was the former Editor-in-chief of the College’s online anthology, plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing. She currently lives in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction

By Stephanie Gray

HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / $10

Just as cinematic language can bypass rational intellect and converse directly with memory, intuition and dream, Stephanie Gray’s poems casually subvert normative forms of communication and activate a kind of collective vernacular consciousness. “All the back roads changed…I had a job connecting dreams,” she writes, while her language does the mysterious work of linking philosophical rigor with delicious humor and deep investigations into the sonic. Hers is a poetry of vernaculars: of aphorisms, truisms and idiomatics, of the exhaustive pleasure to be found in lists, chants, catchphrases and “variations on a theme.” After reading Gray’s poems, it is impossible to hear cultural commonplaces in quite the same way—like Gray, you will want to make them your own. If Gertrude Stein appeared as a wisecracking secretary in a 1940s gangster flick, she might have Gray’s knack for thoughtful, disjunctive wit: “the secretary has seen it all.”

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Poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray is the author of two poetry collections, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), Heart Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books, 2007), and a chapbook I Thought You Said It Was Sound/How Does That Sound? (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2012). Her poetry has been published in journals such as Aufgabe, Sentence, EOAGH, Esque, Boog City, 2nd Avenue Poetry, VLAK, Brooklyn Rail. She has received funding for her films from the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. She has read her work often live with her films at venues including the Poetry Project Friday series, Segue series (with Tina Darragh), Triptych series (with Jonas Mekas) and others such as community garden Le Petit Versailles and Angel Orensanz Foundation. Her films have screened at fests such as Oberhausen, Viennale, Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground, and NYC venues such as Microscope Gallery, Millennium Film Workshop, and Mono No Aware. She had a retrospective of her films at Anthology Film Archives in Spring 2015.

Turn It Over

BY JAIME SHEARN COAN

HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / Sold-out

Turn It Over is a work of excavation; these poems seek to uncover where the self is located within the territories of memory, grief, family, secrets, and most especially the body. Shearn Coan writes, “How I formed a true question and am asking it still. What is more present than the body?” In precise and gorgeous language, he traces his own borders and maps his loves, while staying grounded in our material experiences. This is a work awake to the nuances of the body in embodiment, and it provokes this awareness in the reader as well.

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Jaime Shearn Coan lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in publications including Drunken Boat, The Kenyon Review, Revista la Tempestad, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry. He is a regular contributor to the dance section of The Brooklyn Rail. Jaime has received fellowships from Poets House, VCCA, and the Saltonstall Foundation, and is the recipient of a 2014 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. A PhD student in English at The CUNY Graduate Center, Jaime also teaches at Hunter College and The City College of New York.

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Be a Dead Girl

By Krystal Languell

LETTERPRESSED, HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / Sold-out

Krystal Languell’s deadpan wit in Be A Dead Girl subtly conveys the violence that happens with subjects are transformed into objects. In these poems, an “I” that is always in flux moves through a world that’s unsure where things end and people begin, and negotiates this uncertainty with quips that are seductively light on the tongue. The sly aphorisms embedded in Languell’s language are by turns visually stunning (“Beauty dissolves to make fire green”), hilarious (“Joyride to your grave”) and chillingly expressive of the perils of consumerism (“But I hemorrhage money privately”). There are refrains reminiscent of Pop songs, and a sensual phraseology that Emily Dickinson might use if she were tasked with writing advertisements for war machines. These poems invite the reader, at her own risk, to create continuity from a chaos that is all the more terrifying for its elusiveness: “If you came here for a story/put this in your mouth.”

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Krystal Languell was born in South Bend, Indiana. She is the author of the books Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011) and Gray Market (Coconut, 2015) and the chapbooks Last Song (dancing girl press, 2014), and Be a Dead Girl (Argos Books, 2014). In early 2014, Fashion Blast Quarter was published as a poetry pamphlet by Flying Object. A core member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, she also edits the journal Bone Bouquet. She is a 2014-2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council workspace resident.

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“I am having what you might call a hard time: on Be A Dead Girl” a review by Alexis Pope at Entropy

The Fierce Bums of Doo-wop

By amber atiya

Foil-stamped, HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK

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Amber Atiya’s poems in the fierce bums of doo-wop arouse and terrify in equal measure. She has a rare ability to manage several complex valences at once— eros, comedy, and atrocity among them—skillfully braiding them into a whole, mysteriously synthetic body of work. Pleasurable and risky as “the urge// to fry bacon/ in my vegan/ lover’s favorite pan,” Atiya’s poems answer the urgent call of our times for language that is accurate yet imaginative, slick yet embarrassing, ethically gorgeous and hot as hell.

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Amber Atiya is a queer poet and native Brooklynite. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlas Review, Boston Review, Apogee Journal, Anti-, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She received a 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination, a fellowship from Poets House, and is a proud member of a women’s writing group celebrating 12 years and counting.

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An interview with Amber Atiya at New Books in Poetry. 9/29/2014

Real Talk with Amber Atiya at Poets&Writers 12/1/2014

Amber Atiya reads from fierce bums at the Poetry Foundation.

By Caitie Moore

hand-bound chapbook / sold-out

… the city I’ve chosen not
to go on loving forever
to which one returns
reminding me she believes the earth is a warm place
and getting warmer, there is no leaving,
there is one place and one life
and so I go to see the dancer who unempties
the air to the shape of his gesture.

The lush, ragged texture of Caitie Moore’s lyric responds precisely to the textures of our shared anthropocene: contingent yet committed, harmonious yet disastrous. With a language that is as invested in beauty as it is in ethical inquiry, the poems in Wife reveal the work of a heart that thinks the whole world, and a mind that loves it fiercely.

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Caitie Moore is a poet, educator and curator. Her work can be found in Strangemachine, Ink Node, Handsome, MuthaFucka, BOMBlog, and in the collection The Racial Imaginary, forthcoming from Fence Books.

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