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
22 + Shipping

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.

2019 Argos Poetry Calendar

Featuring work by diana arterian

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For our sixth Argos Poetry Calendar, we are thrilled to present Diana Arterian’s Songs of Innorience, our first calendar featuring a work by a single poet/artist. In this series, Arterian combines the text and original lithograph images of William Blake’s beloved Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, using principles of intuition and intimacy to weave together the opposing valences of Blake’s profound vision. These pieces offer an uncanny encounter with Blake’s familiar images and language, made new through Arterian’s particular mythological sensibility. “I stained the hollow floor/I wrote each clear day,” ends the first piece in the series, featured for the month of January 2019. The calendar brings a wild new Blakean multimedia gem for each month through February 2020: deliciously dangerous companions as we head toward a new decade of the 21st century.

DIANA ARTERIAN is the author of the poetry collection Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press, 2017), the chapbooks With Lightness & Darkness and Other Brief Pieces(Essay Press, 2017), Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and co-editor of Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet, 2016). A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and her poetry, essays, and translations have been featured in Asymptote, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Poetry Foundation website, among others.

Born and raised in Arizona, she currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a doctoral candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA in poetry from CalArts, where she was a Beutner Fellow.

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

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)

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.

2018 Argos Poetry Calendar

14 MONTHS / sold-out

A calendar is no simple reckoning of dates. Each of us carries our own calendar inside, our own anniversaries both lovely and brutal. A date, like scar tissue, might mark an otherwise anonymous Wednesday. A year arrives, turns, departs, and is replaced by another version of itself, layer upon layer as a life is lived, as memory settles like sediment over the days.

Now a new year is arriving, and for the fifth time we are making a calendar to mark this cultural decision of renewal. Inside these pages are voices and images that touch us with their beauty and truth, that sing. Though we experience the years as moving faster, a moment stays mysteriously elastic. These poems are moments that will expand to enrich and deepen the coming year of days. And we are grateful to be able to share them with you.

Our fifth annual limited-edition calendar features poems by Holly Anderson, Ari Banias, Chia-Lun Chang, Miri Gabriel, Julia Guez, Harmony Holiday, Amy Lawless, Ricky Maldonado, Sade Murphy, Maryam Parhizkar, Brandon Shimoda, Eleni Sikelianos, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Rachael Wilson.

With cover and interior artwork by Sadie Bills.