How We Kill a Glove

by MA Lan

Translated by Charles A. laughlin w/ Martine Bellen

RELEASE DATE: April 2023
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Ma Lan writes poems that carry us suddenly into the vast, strange worlds of myth and dream. Blurring the lines between subject and object, Ma’s poetry reveals the character, the liveliness inherent in objects, which seems hidden but never really was (“I wrap a floral tablecloth around my body/making the napkins line up naked”); her poems operate their own internal logic that aligns and then departs from the logic of shared reality (“Death never rejects a reason for ceasing to breathe”). Charles Laughlin’s sensitive, acute translation of Ma Lan’s poems bring readers into a world where “Poets are flirtatious horses”, moving with all of the might and symbolism of ancient folklore. Ma, a member of the Muslim Hui ethnic nationality in China, builds surreal spaces in these poems, embedding them with mysterious and at times menacing political undertones. “Where does it come from, this ponderous density?” she asks, using language to search the physical and metaphysical. “Like dreaming a dream beyond the universe.”

Ma Lan was born in Meishan, Sichuan, in the People’s Republic of China, a member of the Muslim Hui ethnic nationality. Formerly an accountant at China Construction Bank, she emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. Lan began publishing poetry in 1982, and has published poetry and fiction in Chinese literary journals such as Hua cheng (Flower City), Zhongshan, Renmin wenxue (People’s Literature), Xiaoshuo jie (Fiction World), Jintian (Today), and Poetry Monthly, in addition to selected works in various annual and topical poetry anthologies. Ma Lan has self-published a poetry collection Zuo zai nali (Where to Sit), a short story collection Hua fei hua (The Flowers are not Flowers), and for many years served as editor of Olive Tree online literary magazine, the first online journal of serious contemporary Chinese literature. Recently, fifteen of her poems were included with works of twenty-two other Chinese poets living around the world in the anthology Sihai wei shi (Poems in All Directions) edited by Mi Jiayan and published by Shanxi Media and Publication Group.

Jumping into the American River: New and Selected Poems Volume 1

BY Mary Norbert Korte

Edited By Iris Cushing & Jason WeisS

RELEASE DATE: June 2023
PUBLISHED IN COLLABORATION WITH TKS BOOKS
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER / $22 + shipping

This is a true Outrider tale. Mary Norbert Korte (1934-2022) first went to the Catholic nunnery, and then to the woods to live deliberately as Thoreau did at Walden, aching for a radical spiritual frequency, a space and pace to breathe and awaken her own biophilia. Then she jumped into the wild mind of the New American Poetry and also kept evolving in the faith that never left her, continuing that devotional deliberation as the world kept opening its sensorium and she further dedicated her life to the saving of the giant sequoia. She was never not a poet. Her poems are often rituals in service of creation. Quirky too, even salty, down to earth, yet always with a dose of the sublime. Korte is a practitioner of the wild, as Gary Snyder would have it, which is more and more inside us as it disappears. There are so many beautiful, visionary poems in this book. Meditations on dust as the “road that lives with you on your plate,” same dust on the same rhododendron, on the river, every mountain into the sea…Deep elegies for Lew Welch and Brother Antoninus, her lengths of loyalty there, an effortful dream of pushing her grandmother’s puce velour sofa up Mt. Everest, in “Sisypha: Running Down.” Myriad animalia, winged and walking always entering with their own lifestyles, scent of wild sage, and place at the bottom of the canyon where the sky breaks open a few moments a day and you look up the way you’d check for spiders on the outhouse seat. “A Breviary in Time of Drought” had me weeping, with a sense of the timelessness of mystic faith. How we might better count and dedicate our hours. As she does with her sharp ecological attentions to the thousand things of this world. She was a rarity, brave steward of her own life and held what was around her always in companionship and with awe. May this book travel far and wide. And may Mary Norbert Korte be recognized as well for the communities she inhabited, and brought life to, alongside the Beats and San Francisco cultural poet heroes. Welcome to her gates of Eden. – Anne Waldman

Don’t take my word for it; take Michael McClure’s, Jack Spicer’s, Lew Welch’s, Diane di Prima’s, Denise Levertov’s, and Allen Ginsberg’s, for these poets and more recognized a fellow practitioner of the state of the art in Mary Norbert Korte. Bursting into the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 in a soon-discarded nun’s habit, Korte published in the thriving mimeo scene of the era, but then largely dropped out, going off grid and devoting herself to redwood preservation. Jumping into the American River: New & Selected Poems instead shows Korte pursuing the art as a devotional practice within her life. Unashamedly occasional, quotidian, diaristic, Korte’s poems nonetheless partake in a mystic ecological consciousness, her art concealed by apparent clarity. But check out a mid-’80s tour de force like “In Memoriam” to glimpse the sheer range of subject matter and linguistic material she can bring to a single poem. A much-needed reintroduction to a missing figure of San Francisco Renaissance/ Beat poetry, with an excellent biographical introduction and an intimate portrait as afterword, Jumping into the American River is a crucial rediscovery from a heroic era in American poetry. – GarrettCaples

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!

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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!

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)

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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

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

by Samantha Zighelboim

Full-length / $16

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

by Johannes Heldén

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

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Release Date: May 1, 2017

Astro + US Shipping $25.00 USD Astro + UK Shipping $35.00 USD

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 is a visual artist, writer and musician. His work deals with artificial intelligence, ecology, poetry,  science fiction, sentience and interactive narrative structures. He has published twelve books, most recently Astroecology (2016) which was published in three languages and made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. Heldén was the recipient of the Åke Andrén Art Prize in 2015 and the Evolution project won the inaugural N. Katherine Hayles prize in 2014. He has published four music albums, most recently System (Irrlicht), and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art.  His work has recently been shown at ISEA in Vancouver, Broken Dimanche in Berlin, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Inspace in Edinburgh, Moderna Museet Stockholm, UB Center for the Arts Buffalo, The Fifth Moscow Biennale, The Media Archaelogy Lab/University of Colorado, Volt in Bergen, ICIDS Istanbul, NIMK in Amsterdam, Dome of Visions in Copenhagen, UKS in Oslo among others. He is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle et al. Follow him at

www.johanneshelden.com
twitter.com/astroekologi

instagram.com/astroecology

Photo by Martin Vallin

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

Khadijah Queen is the author of three books and three chapbooks. Individual poems appear or are forthcoming in Fence, jubilat, RHINO, Aufgabe, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. She is the 2014 winner of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing, which includes a staged production of her verse play Non-sequitur in 2015. Visit her website: khadijahqueen.com

White Blight

by Athena Farrokhzad

translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Full-length, Hardcover

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White Blight + US Shipping $20.00 USD White Blight + UK shipping $30.00 USD

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

Athena Farrokhzad was born in 1983 and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, play wright and teacher of creative writing. After several years of collaborative poetry projects and international literary work she published her first volume of poetry Vitsvit (White Blight) in 2013, at Albert Bonniers förlag. The book circles around the topic of revolution, war, migration and racism, and how these experiences condition the lives of different family members. Vitsvit received several literary awards and was/is being translated to different languages (Danish, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish, Arabic, etc) and performed as a play at the Swedish Radio theatre and at Unga Klara theatre. Farrokhzad teaches creative writing at Biskops-Arnös författarskola, and has translated writers such as Adrienne Rich, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig and Nicole Brossard into Swedish. In 2015, her second volume of poetry, Trado, written together with the Romanian poet Svetlana Carstean, will be published.

Poet, translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed her M.F.A. in poetry from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent translation projects include Ida Börjel’s Miximum Ca’Canny The Sabotage Manuals you cutta da pay, we cutta da shob (Commune Editions, 2014) and Karl Larsson’s Form/Force (Black Square Editions, 2015); previous work includes Fredrik Nyberg’s A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), and Eva Sjödin’s Inner China (Litmus Press, 2005). Her poetry and translations have been published in journals such as The Asian American Literary Review, Salt Hill, Chicago Review, and Circumference, while her art projects have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including the Centre Pompidou, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the New Museum, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She is Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York. (Portrait by Julia Shirar)

*For shipping prices to countries other than the US or UK please email info@argosbooks.org.

LINKS & REVIEWS

“A fever that escalates with every blow” by Kaveh Akbar
A Review: White Blight by Samantha Wood
The Shadow of Whiteness by Jonathan Farmer
White Blight Reviewed by Gina Myers
White Blight reviewed in Publishers Weekly
White Blight review at Open Books
White Blight Reviewed by Charlotte Muzzi
NTA Longlist
Janice Worthen recommends at SPD
Athena Farrokhzad reads at IASPIS