I love you and I’m not dead

I love you and I’m not dead

by Sade LaNay
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What kinds of errant crystals has Sade LaNay placed upon their throat to make these polyvocalities so audible?  So that from the violated archives of Black history, LaNay makes a clearing for a fugitive chorus — poets, organizers, librarians, educators, reverends, —who refuse to negotiate on the prisms of Black life. I Love You and I’m Not Dead requests your care and attention without promising anything in return: clarity, closure, reconciliation. If, as LaNay articulates, the afterlives of chattel slavery are made intimate in the trauma of everyday enfleshment, Black femme languaging, Black femme imaginative labor might be a space to configure radical kinships across time. Who can be ready for the brilliance in these pages, for the “demonic grounds” the book insists upon, for the trajectories LaNay’s poiesis has carved out and to which we must now attend?    –Jennif(f)er Tamayo

Watch the book trailer here!

Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).

Sade LaNay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).Sade Lanay is the author of Dream Machine (2014), self portrait (2018) and Härte (2018).

Down with Gargamel!

Down With Gargamel!

by Luis Othoniel Rosa

trans. Noel Black

Release date: Aug 2020
Available for preorder / $16


Down with Gargamel! is a futurist tale set in Puerto Rico, New York, and Colorado Springs that unfolds during the transition from peak oil production to a future that’s formless, dangerous, and full of possibility. As global capitalism collapses under the weight of a worsening environmental crisis, we encounter the stories of six friends as they move through different forms of consciousness and across galaxies. Stories are presented as a narrative fractal in which the same occurrence is retold at different scales. Conversations abound: on black holes during a Puerto Rican blackout; inside the head of a schizophrenic professor; in an apartment in Brooklyn the very morning the world learns aliens have sent us a message; at a “happy death home” where three comrades and a cat care for twelve voluntarily dying bodies; and finally between intergalactic Smurfs and a nostalgic angel. Rosa’s vision is at once absurd and terrifying, specific and idealistic, rooted in the paranoid tradition of J.L. Borges and Phillip K. Dick and inspired by a wide range of radical political movements.

Praise for Down with Gargamel

“In a near future, yuca is exchanged for rum and candle caravans travel from Santurce to Río Piedras. In a far future, in a prophesy of the past, we are drawn to cathedrals that serve as complex ecosystems, underground tunnels connecting narratives, lives that unfold into each other and are suddenly cut short, ending a pattern driven by the proximity of difference. Othoniel has written a novel whose language infectiously spreads like riotous voices filling a once-empty palace.”

—Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and while they sleep (under the bed is another country)


Luis Othoniel Rosa (Puerto Rico, 1985) is the author of the novels Otra vez me alejo (Argentina, 2012) and Caja de fractales (Argentina/Puerto Rico 2017), and of the study Comienzos para una estética anarquista: Borges con Macedonio (Chile, 2016). He studied at the University of Puerto Rico and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton. He teaches Latin American literature at the University of Nebraska. Down with Gargamel! is his first book translated into English.

Two Hunters

Two Hunters

BY marina blitshteyn

FORTHCOMING January 10, 2019

AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER / $16


The sonically-hypnotic poems in this collection pry open the space between sounds and what they mean, and the violence of this prying is analogous to the ordinary violences that women live with the world over. “Orange you happy yet, a serious threat/a surfeit, a certain fate, a surer fret,” Blitshteyn chants, and you find yourself wanting to feel her language on your tongue, even as that language evokes an unbearable reality. Wrapped up in these fiercely elegant poems are narratives of language acquisition, precarious immigrations, and song-like imperatives for the best kinds of destruction.

PRAISE FOR TWO HUNTERS

Two Hunters holds language in the tautology of fear as what we live and what we dream. Marina Blitshteyn offers us story and abandon, pain and power–what is claimed and reclaimed, learned and unlearned. Stark, sonic, these poems demand to be read in red.

–Khadijah Queen

Long awaited, but thankfully arriving at the moment we need it most, Marina Blitshteyn’s Two Hunters skillfully mirrors, confirms and explains our disorienting moment in history by mining the poets’ own experience of patriarchy and America with such confidence and linguistic dexterity we almost believe we can survive it. Sonically inventive, formally surprising, energetic, and sometimes a bit surreal, these poems are at once exhilarating to read and deeply unsettling (though necessary) in their truth.

– Lynn Melnick

Marina Blitshteyn, queen of the chapbook form, releases her first full-length collection, Two Hunters, later this month. Two Hunters offers you a Hurtz Donut on the playground. (The fun game where you get bopped in the nose and asked: “Hurts, don’t it?”) But Blitshteyn’s work isn’t cruel; it hurts because the depth of its empathy plumbs, plumbs, plunges.

Krystal Languell, Poetry Foundation

Born in the Soviet Union, Marina Blitshteyn and her family fled to the US in 1991 as refugees. She studied English at SUNY Buffalo, where she edited the longstanding annual Name poetry journal, and Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she also served as a University Writing Fellow and consultant. She is the author of Two Hunters, her first full-length collection, to be published by Argos Books in 2018 with a CLMP Face-Out grant. Prior chapbooks include Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), and the forthcoming Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press). Her work has been anthologized in the new Brooklyn Poets Anthology, The &Now Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, Why I Am Not a Painter, and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She teaches Composition and Rhetoric and experimental nonfiction, and occasionally runs The Loose Literary Canons, a feminist reading group in NYC.

photo credit: Luke Bumgarner

The Fat Sonnets

The Fat Sonnets

by Samantha Zighelboim

Full-length / $16


Samantha Zighelboim’s debut collection conducts a radical re-examination of what we mean by body. In these poems, body is noun, verb and adverb; body is dearly beloved and fiercely rejected; it is by turns a singularly beautiful process and a frightening object. Zighelboim takes the sonnet form as a loose premise, a la Bernadette Mayer, but then explodes, expands, defies and otherwise grows out of supposed formal limits, making language into a living embodiment of the refusal of (institutional, patriarchal, cultural) control. The poet’s refusal of the social invisibility of fat bodies is essential. “I am a perfect fucking blossom,” Zighelboim writes, and also “I am entitled to the loneliness of my interminable appetite.” Offering felt registers as subtle as “The oblique/ correspondence between/ a soft body/ and a thin/ layer of/ pulp,” this is the writing of a sharp and observant world-eater: a cosmophage in the truest sense.

Praise for The Fat Sonnets

The Fat Sonnets are greathearted, wickedly brilliant, and wise. Samantha Zighelboim writes with rare passion and exactitude: she can cure, or kill what ails you, and yet she sings from the soul, which is beyond diagnosis, at once perfect; eternal and savagely hungry since whenever eternity began. Hilarious and cruel, every page swells with compassion. I love this book. It is deeply nutritious. It will feed you.

—Ariana Reines

Which stories do we tell, and which do we only pretend to tell? Samantha Zighelboim’s searing debut insists that words are flesh, that if there’s “no space for body on the barstool,” there will be “no space for body in the poetry.” In these poems, the fat body feeds on and feeds a slippery surfeit of language: Zighelboim reminds us that this body is made not just of  “late night binge fantasy delivery orders,” but also of etymology, dreams, “petty silks,” diagnostic euphemisms, interspecies bonds, and “the fountain/ pen of a spinster.” Funhouse-mirror-reflections of Bernadette Mayer’s “skinny sonnets,” these fat sonnets swell with longing: a line becomes a paragraph; a poem splits down the middle like a calving iceberg, a calving body, a manatee floating “in that weightless, boring way.” But this book is anything but boring. Zighelboim’s narrator is too quick, too witty, too self-aware. “I am very charming sometimes,” she reminds us, slyly. “I am a perfect fucking blossom.”

—MC Hyland

Samantha Zighelboim is a 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Poetry, a recipient of a Face Out grant from CLMP, and the co-recipient of the 2016 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation from The Poetry Foundation. Her poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, Boston Review, The Guardian (as part of Asymptote’s ‘Translation Tuesday’ series), PEN Poetry Series, Stonecutter, Fanzine, Public Pool, Sixth Finch, Bone Bouquet and Springhouse, among others. She  lives in New York City, and teaches creative writing and literature at Rutgers University and The New School. (Author photo credit: Alexis Baldwin)

Elegy with Pilot Light

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.

Astroecology

Astroecology

by Johannes Heldén

Tr. by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, & Johannes Heldén

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Release Date: May 1, 2017

I turn to Astroecology and its Encyclopedia when the weight of the actual world grows heavy, and I need to be surprised, or puzzled, or refreshed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin

A vision both nostalgic and premonitory. A transmigration of the mundane, decay upon decay, read as imminent luminescence.
– David Sylvian

Johannes Heldén’s Astroecology begins from an eschatological place: the world as we know it is ending, and this cosmic ending can be witnessed in that most intimate and privileged of places, the private estate. Astroecology finds us in a real house and a real garden, surrounded by endlessly meaningful details, arranged with the precision of a Twin Peaks-like murder mystery. In a series of filmic visual frames and corresponding textual notes, Heldén offers a poetics that twists the organic (plants, pets, decay and growth) and the inorganic (drones, data systems, AI) into each other as a kind of avant-garde Mobius strip. A dazzling intertexuality unfolds: Inger Christensen’s indexical impulse meets Hayao Miyazaki’s surrealism, Chris Marker’s stark montage meets Robert Smithson’s iconography, Ursula LeGuin’s social investigation meets Norbert Weiner’s theory of cybernetics. In letting the reader-viewer get “stuck in the stream of evolution” over and over again, Heldén brings us to profound unanswerable questions about the origins of the universe: its processes, systems, and vanishing species of creature and thought.
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Fearful Beloved

Fearful Beloved

BY khadijah queen

Full-length / $16 + Shipping


The haunting, haunted world revealed in Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved stays with the reader in an uncomfortably pleasurable way, and heightens awareness of our own world’s deep horrors and ordinary brilliance. Anyone who has been unable to shake the erotic brutality of, say, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel will savor the “bruisable monuments” that Queen offers. Here Queen crafts a language that unfolds along multiple axes (spatial, temporal, emotional, spiritual) and is experimental with form while remaining seamless, precise, and vivid as “The song she sang as a little girl feeding ants.” Addressing Fear head-on—“your spectrality exists,” she insists—Queen’s Fearful Beloved evidences the fierce intelligence of “a body in its own time, possessed of itself.”

Praise for Fearful Beloved

Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved is an audacious gaze at the public and private spaces where we often fear, in our words and acts, to address the body of fear itself. Queen gives her fear inestimable flesh and her poetry insists, as readers and bodies, that we must not look away from our own spines and mirrors. She writes, “if you listen – not you, fear,/but us, as you – deciding how to exist”. Her vision of bodies, intricately complex as her astonishing syntax, gleams with the tension of power, desire, mortality, and violence. Burning, and nuanced, Queen dares us to name our deepest bones, “O/let godliness and beastliness crash/together until compliance/O/love them all/O say every one of their names.”  Here you will discover a language of marrow, brilliant and potent as bloodroot. Here, in Fearful Beloved, you will witness the velocity of Queen’s distinct voice, intense and profound in its survival. —Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved is a bold mosaic of forms, and each poem is a shade of aching. Together, they shape fiercely potent letters to fear; feminine and power and despair; the demolition of the contemplative house. —Lily Hoang

Fear, like any organism, rushes to reproduce, but more than survival it values reach. In the grout, on the nerves, across oceans, at the root. Foolhardy, slamming every door, heightening each wave. Until Khadijah Queen speaks fear’s name with intention, shows us how to apply the bloodroot. Barehanded. Bare leaden voice, spine of steel that somehow bends. Cross, uncross your arms, your saltwater heart. Let her in, beloved. —Danielle Pafunda

Queen’s Fearful Beloved is a beautiful book, haunting and haunted. The architecture of the house entangles with the architecture of the body to produce a language at once beguiling and strange, yet fused with the fiercest love. —Kate Durbin

Fear can make us its dwelling place; it can have us haunting our own house.  Khadijah Queen writes us through the rooms of the forest, the limits of shelter, from what we needed once to what we might be free to become without it. Fearful Beloved speaks directly along the lines of rootedness and growth, the blasting or freeing power of something seemingly small, the way a person shaped by fear “strikes at movements invisible to those accustomed to the light.” When you can see yourself to save yourself, that is when you can begin. —Kate Schapira

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White Blight


White Blight

by Athena Farrokhzad

translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Full-length, Hardcover

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This vital book exposes the dense tectonics churning beneath migrant dreams. Accusatory, loving, full of grief and sage truths, Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight speaks eloquently to the troubled inheritance of diasporic survival. Through a litany of terse voices, Jennifer Hayashida’s sensitive translation describes the nexus of filial obligations and projections under which the narrator sinks from view. The intense beauty of devastation and the poignancy of betrayal emerge with startling frankness: “Your family will never be resurrected like roses after a fire.” “I have spent a fortune for your piano lessons / But at my funeral you will refuse to play.” These white lines make me ask, what has been bleached out in all of our stories? I read this book, and I remembered my humanity.

— Sueyeun Juliette Lee

It is hard to explain not just the resonance of Athena Farrokhzad’s work but of Farrokhzad herself. She is a major figure in Sweden, an outspoken feminist and leftist. She is also a stunning writer. On its surface White Blight is a story of migration, how it shapes and misshapes the familiar. Everyone in this poem has something to say about immigration’s trauma, on the impact globalization has on all sorts of intimacy, even as they are so rarely talking to each other. It is also a poem that moves through many registers. At moments it is mannered and metaphoric. At other moments frank and colloquial, intimate too. And Jennifer Hayashida has skillfully translated this complicated work into an ease of English.

—  Juliana Spahr

In White Blight, Athena Farrokhzad evokes a language of feeling that is vivid and deeply familiar. The poem performs as intimately as memory, but with the direct language of confession or accusation. In this world, the family unit nurtures by prolonging disquietude, as there is no forgetting the ruptures of exile and immigration. Still these voices yearn to be proven wrong in a future they cannot predict. The pith and force of the language shines through in Jennifer Hayashida’s careful translation, both polished and knife-sharp.

— Wendy S. Walters

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The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

By Bianca Lynne Spriggs

Full-Length/$16 + Shipping


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From different species of automatons to spiders, ants, and bees, from moons to yellow jacket nests, Bianca Spriggs’ Eye is quick and slow enough to show us that the galaxy is vast and atomic, tiny. In this  science-minded and sensual collection, red lips stand in constellation with the “dionaea muscipula on the fly” and tongues are abacuses. Bodies are “astonishing machine[s]” made up of “stardust, / coils of oxygen and carbon / and hydrogen compressed / by time…” The yellow jacket nest is also the nest of the once-self becoming. And a mountain is a parent teaching us about what it means to endure. At a time when our senses and imaginations are inundated with terrifying news and shorthand, poems like these are critical for the ways they remind us that imagination, itself, might be a kind of balm or mercy. That with our imaginations we might remember our kinship to every, every thing in the universe. In The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor Spriggs models awe while deftly conjuring emotion in nuanced moments of syntactical invention. Yes, there is heartache here. Yes, there is loss. But these all give way to necessary metamorphosis and transformation, and this is exactly where, again and again, Spriggs cultivates hope. We are reminded: “Breath, like everything, / waits in line to return / through someone else.”

–Aracelis Girmay

In these poems Bianca Spriggs becomes the heart’s astronaut, exploring, imagining, bringing the distant closer, giving substance to the invisible. In poem after poem she bears witness that the universe is a vast metaphor in which the outer world corresponds with the inner.  The strongest of these poems chronicle this quest, illuminating, enlarging our supposed individual smallness. Her fresh language and originality make The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor well worth the journey.

–Richard Taylor
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Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca Lynne Spriggs, is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. Spriggs is the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, multiple Artist Enrichment and Arts Meets Activism grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. She is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), and Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016), as well as the co-editor for Circe’s Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women(Accents Publishing, 2016) and Undead: Ghouls, Ghosts, and More (Apex Publications, 2017).

A Poem for Record Keepers

A Poem for Record Keepers

By Ali Power

full-length $15


Ali Power’s A Poem For Record Keepers is a long poem made of short poems that comes on like a deadpan phalanx system unlearning itself while crashing resignation into the boards and pulling the rug out from under certainty line by line. But certainty is not simply replaced by uncertainty; an angular, witty openness accumulates across Power’s poem, making it excellent company. That openness also lends itself to the poem’s capacity to build the kind of necessarily enigmatic space love requires to fend off the grinding mob-vacuum that is contemporary American life these days.

–Anselm Berrigan

You could compare the way A Poem for Record Keepers works to the ways other things work—locked-groove records, Lorine Niedecker’s calendar poems, waves—but never for too long. As much as Ali Power’s poetry delights in forward motion and real speaking, it also teaches you how to remain still and listen. This is an ingenious, biting, elegant book. To enter it is to feel squeezed by time and even (if you want to, as I did) by hope: “Everything is just beginning.” It is, and it does. Then everything begins again, right here.

—Mark Bibbins

The poet as one who maintains a history of one’s activities. The poem as record, as in ledger, one entry per every other line, record as something we replay when it’s a favorite. These lines now live in my head. They are strange enough to keep me on my toes, familiar enough to seem like they are talking about me and everyone I know. In fact, I do want to “hang out” with this new book and its author.

– Stacy Szymaszek

Ali Power is the author of the book-length poem A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016) and the co-editor of the volume New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight (Rizzoli, 2014). Power’s poems have appeared in the Brooklyn RailLITNo, Dear,The Pen Poetry Series, and elsewhere. From 2008 to 2015, she was an editor at Rizzoli Publications in New York. Currently, she is pursuing her master’s degree in social work at New York University and co-curates the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series. For more info: ali-e-power.com

Author photo by Hillery Stone.

Catacombs

Catacombs

by Safiya Sinclair

Essay & Poetry/ $15



This remarkable perfect-bound chapbook showcases the talents of a major emerging writer in both poetry and prose.

Sinclair’s is an arresting new voice that makes us sit up and re-think.  Her mythopoeic imagination thrives on startling metaphors and combinations of images.  Eschewing the naturalistic and consolatory, the poetry is alive in disturbing implosions of consciousness, drawn to cataclysm and apocalypse, whether in personal or communal histories. —Eddie Baugh

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“With lush, vivid descriptions and a narrative haunted by figments of the seen and unseen, Safiya Sinclair’s remarkable collection, Catacombs gives shape and voice to a part of the Caribbean that has never before been rendered into verse.”  —Mark Wunderlich

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

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.”

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.

(guns & butter)

(guns & butter)

by montana ray

full-Length / $15


Combine Apollinaire with Pam Grier and you might come close to Montana Ray’s ferocious debut, (guns & butter). Each concrete poem is shaped like a gun and its poetic interiors are bracingly brutal and gorgeous. Capsuled in parentheticals, each magnetic phrase is locked and loaded as Ray burns holes into subjects ranging from interracial love, single motherhood, to America’s unrelenting addiction to gun violence.

Her voice is mesmerizing, tender, vicious, chimeric, as she veers between role-playing a warrior glock-wielding Annie Oakley to “warm, new mother.” I love (guns & butter) and cannot sing it enough praises. It’s the kind of rare first collection that is startling, necessary, and is truly like no other book.

–Cathy Park Hong

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Children of Another Hour

Children of Another Hour

by Mara Pastor

Translated by Noel Black

Letterpressed, Hand-bound chapbook / $10


“Come, astronomer,/ and tell me your abysses./ That static that smashes/ into our heads every time we mend// a beginning.”

In this collection of twenty intensely imagined poems, Mara Pastor has built a whole universe of post-futuristic melancholy. These poems, despite their brevity, take on the human condition – love and death – in a world of cosmonauts, scientists, space travel, and post-apocalyptic gloom. They are concerned with the fleeting nature of our time here on earth (and in space), our inability to connect with each other, and also with our fate as a species. The poet Noel Black has rendered this work in an American English so natural and fine that it almost feels inevitable. This is the kind of book you keep in your pocket and your head for a very long time.

Mara Pastor (San Juan, 1980) is a poet, editor and translator. Her works include the books of poetry: Poemas para fomentar el turismo (La secta de los perros, 2012); Candada por error (Atarraya Cartonera, 2009) and Alabalacera, (Terranova, 2006). Mara’s creative and critical writings have appeared in several magazines and she is featured in such anthologies as Hallucinated Horse: New Latin American Poetry (Pighog Press, 2012) and Red de voces: poesía puertorriqueña (Casa de las Américas, 2012). At this time, she lives in Mexico City.

Noel Black lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, artist Marina Eckler, and their two sons. Co-founder with Ed Berrigan of LOG Magazine and publisher of Angry Dog Midget Editions in the late 1990s, he has since worked as a writer and producer for a wide variety of media outlets including The Stranger and WNYC. He currently works as a producer for KRCC public radio. He is the author of half-a-dozen chapbooks including Hulktrans (Owl Press) and In The City of Word People (Blue Press, 2008).

Swan

Swan

By Karin Gottshall

Letterpressed, hand-bound chapbook / $10


In the hundred//years I was nine I solved ten thousand math problems/ but no one asked me what I loved, so I just//unbuckled my shoes each night, alone with it.

–from “Forecast”

Karin Gottshall’s Swan finds extraordinarily vivid patterns of emotion evident in the materials of the “everyday.” In the tradition of great American female life-lyricists—Lyn Henjian, Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Guest—Gottshall generously allows readers not only to think about childhood, the passage of time, and the vulnerability of objects, but to feel those phenomena. Her deft handling of the lines between interior and exterior—and between “then” and “now”—merits reading and re-reading. The transformative nature of these poems invites the reader to study Gottshall’s language closely, and to study the emotional syntax of her own life in turn.


Karin Gottshall is a poet, fiction writer, and creative writing instructor. Her most recent book, The River Won’t Hold You, won the 2014 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize, and will be published in late 2014. Her first book, Crocus, was published by Fordham University Press in 2007. She is also the author of the poetry chapbooks: Flood Letters (Argos Books, 2011) and Almanac for the Sleepless (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). She teaches poetry writing at Middlebury College, and has also taught at Interlochen Arts Academy and the New England Young Writers’ Conference. Karin live in Middlebury, Vermont.

Gloomerang

gloomerang

BY dagmara kraus
translated by joshua daniel edwin

HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / $10


Exuberant, darkly funny, and very smart, this long poem by German poet Dagmara Kraus makes music from a state of mind. Its voracious attitude to form and diction is  both timeless and completely of this moment. Joshua Daniel Edwin has vividly brought Kraus’s neologisms, music, and rhythms into English with wit and authority. An extremely strong debut from two young poets.

—-

Dagmara Kraus was born in Poland and raised there and in Germany. Her poetry and translations appear widely, including the poetry collections kummerang (KOOKBOOKS, Berlin, 2012) and kleine grammaturgie (Urs Engeler/roughbooks, Solothurn, 2013). She currently lives in rural France and is translating the diary of Polish poet Miron Białoszewski.

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Joshua Daniel Edwin’s poetry appears in a variety of publications in print and online. His translations of Dagmara Kraus’ poetry were awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a 2012 ALTA Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the editorial board for the magazine Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Matter: A Picturebook


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Matter: A Picturebook

by Dorothea Lasky and Matthew Fischer
Hand-Sewn Folio with silkscreened cover / $15


Matter: A Picturebook, the second installment of the Side by Side series, takes up language as physical material actively engaged with color, shape and space. This folio of new poems by Dorothea Lasky came about as a kind of reverse ekphrasis. Matthew Fischer, whose gestural abstract paintings serve as “records of personal and social expressivity,” made a painting in response to each poem. The result is a book of five territories to wander into, five intersections of light and sound, five ways of picturing the “matter” of poetry.

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If I Were Born In Prague

If I Were Born In Prague

By Guy Jean
Versions by Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky

Perfect-bound chapbook/bilingual edition (French & English) / $10space


Guy Jean is a member of the first generation of French-Canadian poets to re-discover the cultural heritage of Acadia, which Jean describes as, “a folklore truculent with daily life, local lore linked to universal legends and songs handed down from generation to generation rich in 17th century tavern songs and music going back to the troubadours.” This culture was devastated by the violent British takeover of the region. In Jean’s work the influence of this culture and history combined with the more familiar French poetics of Rimbaud and Michaux results in a work of haunting lyricism. The poems are both playful and mythic, while still seriously engaging in questions of inherited violence.

In If I were born in Prague Jean’s work is beautifully re-imagined in versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky allowing English readers an entry point into the vital work being done by one of our neighbors.

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The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s

The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s

by Francisca Aguirre
tr. by Montana Ray

PERFECT-BOUND CHAPBOOK / Bilingual edition (Spanish & English)/ $10


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Why I Am Not A Painter

Why I Am Not a Painter:
A Gathering of Poems by MFA Students in NYC

Perfect-bound book (90 pages)/$15


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