How We Kill a Glove

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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 5th, 2023.

Jumping into the American River

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

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 5th, 2023.

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!

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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).

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, July 9th, 2020.

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)

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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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, April 16th, 2020.

2019 Argos Poetry Calendar

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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 16th, 2018.

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
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, August 11th, 2018.

Dept. of Posthumous Letters

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)

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 5th, 2018.

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

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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)

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, January 29th, 2018.

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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, December 1st, 2017.

2018 Argos Poetry Calendar

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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 16th, 2017.

Lunar Flare

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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 7th, 2017.

Astroecology

Astroecology

by Johannes Heldén

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

22 + shipping

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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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 4th, 2017.

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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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 2nd, 2016.

White Blight


White Blight

by Athena Farrokhzad

translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Full-length, Hardcover

18 + Shipping*

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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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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, September 23rd, 2016.

The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

By Bianca Lynne Spriggs

Full-Length/$16 + Shipping


Space
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
space
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).

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, September 14th, 2016.

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

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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 Rail, LIT, No, 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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 8th, 2016.

2016 Argos Poetry Calendar

2016 Argos Poetry Calendar

Hand-Bound Calendar

12 Months

sold-out

Nothing feels steady and indisputable in the way that the months of a year do. The rhythm of a year passing may feel like twelve wheels turning in succession, or water flowing over twelve rocks in a stream. It may appear like twelve messengers bearing letters of similar length–but not content–or twelve clouds passing across the sky, each a distinct shape.

One unit of time, one month or week or moment, may feel endless – it may elongate itself out and out until its flow reverses and returns to where it began. It may also slip by all but unnoticed, as if it had never existed.

Like the feeling of time passing, we know that the structures that mark its passing are not fixed; they have evolved wildly since the beginning of human consciousness, and have been radically different across continents and cultures. These poems may serve as reminders of this: that the structures shaping the cadences and rhythms of our lives – like language – are not fixed either, and that language itself can be a window – or twelve windows – into real freedom.

Our fourth annual hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features poems by Nadia Alexis, Cheryl Clarke, Brenda Coultas, Joey De Jesus, Jay Deshpande, Brenda Iijima, Cynthia Manick, Joseph Massey, Shane McCrae, Trace Peterson, Nina Puro, & Solmaz Sharif.

With cover and interior artwork by Simone Kearney.

[Menhirs xxvii by Simone Kearney]

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 30th, 2015.

Symphony No. 2

Symphony No. 2

by Emily Carlson

hand-bound, foil-stamped chapbook

Sold-Out

“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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 10th, 2015.

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

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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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, September 8th, 2015.

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.”

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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.

Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, June 17th, 2015.
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