Turn It Over
BY JAIME SHEARN COAN
HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / Sold-out
Turn It Over is a work of excavation; these poems seek to uncover where the self is located within the territories of memory, grief, family, secrets, and most especially the body. Shearn Coan writes, “How I formed a true question and am asking it still. What is more present than the body?” In precise and gorgeous language, he traces his own borders and maps his loves, while staying grounded in our material experiences. This is a work awake to the nuances of the body in embodiment, and it provokes this awareness in the reader as well.
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Jaime Shearn Coan lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in publications including Drunken Boat, The Kenyon Review, Revista la Tempestad, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry. He is a regular contributor to the dance section of The Brooklyn Rail. Jaime has received fellowships from Poets House, VCCA, and the Saltonstall Foundation, and is the recipient of a 2014 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. A PhD student in English at The CUNY Graduate Center, Jaime also teaches at Hunter College and The City College of New York.
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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, April 18th, 2015.
(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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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, January 15th, 2015.
2015 Argos Poetry Calendar
HAND-BOUND CALENDAR
12 MONTHS
Sold-out
Time is both circular and linear. The last day of the year returns us to the first day of the next. The length of the days is repeated as the earth tilts back and forth, and our ecology responds. The rains return around the same time, the heat, the snow. And yet the days move forward, from one destination to the next. Calendars are our ancient way of making sense of this. Poems are our ancient way of making sense of something else. Poetry too is both circular and linear. Each word inevitably pushes forward into the next, and yet the last line of a poem returns us to the first. The poem creates its own time, and an ecology results when a mind encounters the poem. And so we hope this calendar offers the reader a unique way of experiencing the year by evoking poetry’s special relationship to time.
Our third annual hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features poems by Evie Shockley, Dana Levin, Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch, Khadijah Queen, Abraham Adams, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jennifer Tamayo, Johannes Göransson, Doug Nufer, Ana Gorría (trans. Yvette Siegert), E Tracy Grinnell, Marina Eckler, and more. With cover and artwork by ruby onyinyechi amanze.
Limited to an edition of 250.
[Painting by ruby onyinyechi amanze]
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 5th, 2014.
Be a Dead Girl
By Krystal Languell
LETTERPRESSED, HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / Sold-out
Krystal Languell’s deadpan wit in Be A Dead Girl subtly conveys the violence that happens with subjects are transformed into objects. In these poems, an “I” that is always in flux moves through a world that’s unsure where things end and people begin, and negotiates this uncertainty with quips that are seductively light on the tongue. The sly aphorisms embedded in Languell’s language are by turns visually stunning (“Beauty dissolves to make fire green”), hilarious (“Joyride to your grave”) and chillingly expressive of the perils of consumerism (“But I hemorrhage money privately”). There are refrains reminiscent of Pop songs, and a sensual phraseology that Emily Dickinson might use if she were tasked with writing advertisements for war machines. These poems invite the reader, at her own risk, to create continuity from a chaos that is all the more terrifying for its elusiveness: “If you came here for a story/put this in your mouth.”
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Krystal Languell was born in South Bend, Indiana. She is the author of the books Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011) and Gray Market (Coconut, 2015) and the chapbooks Last Song (dancing girl press, 2014), and Be a Dead Girl (Argos Books, 2014). In early 2014, Fashion Blast Quarter was published as a poetry pamphlet by Flying Object. A core member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, she also edits the journal Bone Bouquet. She is a 2014-2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council workspace resident.
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“I am having what you might call a hard time: on Be A Dead Girl” a review by Alexis Pope at Entropy
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, October 31st, 2014.
The Fierce Bums of Doo-wop
By amber atiya
Foil-stamped, HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK
Sold-out
Amber Atiya’s poems in the fierce bums of doo-wop arouse and terrify in equal measure. She has a rare ability to manage several complex valences at once— eros, comedy, and atrocity among them—skillfully braiding them into a whole, mysteriously synthetic body of work. Pleasurable and risky as “the urge// to fry bacon/ in my vegan/ lover’s favorite pan,” Atiya’s poems answer the urgent call of our times for language that is accurate yet imaginative, slick yet embarrassing, ethically gorgeous and hot as hell.
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Amber Atiya is a queer poet and native Brooklynite. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlas Review, Boston Review, Apogee Journal, Anti-, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She received a 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination, a fellowship from Poets House, and is a proud member of a women’s writing group celebrating 12 years and counting.
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An interview with Amber Atiya at New Books in Poetry. 9/29/2014
Real Talk with Amber Atiya at Poets&Writers 12/1/2014
Amber Atiya reads from fierce bums at the Poetry Foundation.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, September 20th, 2014.
Wife
By Caitie Moore
hand-bound chapbook / sold-out
… the city I’ve chosen not
to go on loving forever
to which one returns
reminding me she believes the earth is a warm place
and getting warmer, there is no leaving,
there is one place and one life
and so I go to see the dancer who unempties
the air to the shape of his gesture.
The lush, ragged texture of Caitie Moore’s lyric responds precisely to the textures of our shared anthropocene: contingent yet committed, harmonious yet disastrous. With a language that is as invested in beauty as it is in ethical inquiry, the poems in Wife reveal the work of a heart that thinks the whole world, and a mind that loves it fiercely.
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Caitie Moore is a poet, educator and curator. Her work can be found in Strangemachine, Ink Node, Handsome, MuthaFucka, BOMBlog, and in the collection The Racial Imaginary, forthcoming from Fence Books.
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Posted by Iris Cushing, April 8th, 2014.
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.
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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).
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, March 17th, 2014.
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.
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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.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 27th, 2014.
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.
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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.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, February 24th, 2014.
2014 Argos Poetry Calendar
hand-bound
HAND-BOUND CALENDAR
12 MONTHS
$15+ shipping
Sold-out
Poems are something we live among every day. They surround us in ways we don’t always expect, and ground us in time and space as nothing else does. An exploration of poetry’s relationship with time—how language settles and shifts over the course of moments, hours, seasons—that is what this annual project is meant to invite. Our lives transpire in their ordinary and extraordinary way, with the curious presence of our shared language running like a thread throughout.
Our second annual hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features one poem per month for 13 months (including January 2015). With poems by Kazim Ali, Sommer Browning, Christophe Casamassima, Don Mee Choi, Ryan Eckes, Farrah Field, Joan Kane, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Anna Moschovakis, Jared White, and Simone White. Artwork and illustrations by Essye Klempner.
Limited to an edition to 150.
[Painting by Essye Klempner]
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, November 13th, 2013.
Forensics of the Chamber
by j/j hastain
Perfect-bound Hybrid / $15
I refuse to be full of empty.
There are too many visceral ecologies
that could be rung if they
could only be found.
–j/j hastain
A profoundly generative body of work, this collection of interspersed poems and collages make lush and mysterious visual/verbal gems that reveal the presence of a vital imagination at play. This is truly an inter-species book, part image, part story, part human and part wilderness.
j/j hastain is a queer, mystic, seer, singer, photographer, lover, priest/ess, gender shaman and writer. As artist and activist of the audible, j/j is the author of several cross-genre books and enjoys ceremonial performances in an ongoing project regarding gender, shamanism, eros and embodiments. See xir most recent book, myrrh to re all myth, here.
Posted by Iris Cushing, July 15th, 2013.
Which From That Time Infus’d Sweetness Into My Heart
by Joy katz
Hand-Bound Chapbook / sold-out
When it was noon,
In the middle of the night,
In that hour of my life, to have
A moment, so plastic…
Posted by Iris Cushing, July 12th, 2013.
Reveler
by Andrew Durbin
Hand-Bound Chapbook / Sold-out
The gazelle wagers
Its place in the chain
Of events
Because it loves a gamble
–Andrew Durbin
In this beautiful and hallucinatory long poem, Andrew Durbin wanders and wonders through life, love, sex and war, through the bucolic and the urban, startling us at each turn.
Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of art books, pamphlets, ephemera, and glossies. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Fence, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor ofConjunctions, curates the Queer Division reading series at the Bureau of Goods & Services–Queer Division on the Lower East Side, and lives in New York.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, March 3rd, 2013.
2013 Argos Poetry Calendar
Hand-bound calendar
13 months
order $12
sold-out
In time for the new year, this hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features one poem per month for 13 months (including January 2014). Featuring poems by Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Cecilia Vicuña, Hoa Nguyen, Rob Halpern, Noel Black, Ana Božičević, Joy Katz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Lee Ann Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Mark Bibbins and K. Silem Mohammad. Artwork and illustrations by Loie Hollowell.
Limited to an edition to 200.
In time for the new year, this hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features one poem per month for 13 months (including January 2014). Featuring poems by Harryette Mullen, Lisa Jarnot, Hoa Nguyen, Rob Halpern, Noel Black, Joy Katz, Julian Brolaski, Lee Ann Brown, Mónica de la Torre and others. Illustrations by L, Joy Katz, Julian Brolaski, Lee Ann Br
Posted by Iris Cushing, October 26th, 2012.
Quarantine
BY malachi black
HAND-SEWN CHAPBOOK / sold-out
Lord, you are the gulf
between the hoped-for
and the happening:
You’ve won. So what is left for me
when what is left for me has come?
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In this crown of ten sonnets, based on the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, Malachi Black peels back each layer of his being and investigates what we are: “This tremolo of hands, / this fever, this flat-footed dance /of tendons and the drapery / of skin along a skeleton.” The tension and circularity inherent in Black’s form invokes the kinetic properties of the energy that surrounds and exists within us, and ultimately Black’s astute consideration of our condition leaves us hopeful and wanting.
Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press), and two limited-edition chapbooks, including Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). A recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Black has also received recent fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, and the University of Utah. He was the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in the Fall 2011 issue of the Academy of American Poets’ American Poet magazine.
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Quarantine reviewed at Rain Taxi 9/1/2013.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, September 14th, 2012.
I Saw the Devil with His Needlework
By Bianca Stone
Hand-sewn Chapbook / Sold-out
The air was like a bullet made out of silk… so begins Bianca Stone’s I Saw the Devil with His Needlework. In the three long poems that make up this chapbook, Stone explores the double nature of love in ways that seem simultaneously timeless and new.
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Bianca Stone is the author of several chapbooks, including
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Argos Books), and the poetry-comic
I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in
Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and
Tin House. Bianca Stone is also a visual artist and her collaboration with Anne Carson,
Antigonick, a new kind of comic book and translation, was published in spring of 2012 by New Directions. She lives in Brooklyn with the poet, Ben Pease.
Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, June 26th, 2012.
Dusking
by Brandon Kreitler with images by Lindsay Packer
Hand-Sewn Folio with letterpressed cover / $12
This long poem by Brandon Kreitler discovers a tension between not-quite-opposites: interior and exterior, presence and absence, wanting and having. Artist Lindsay Packer’s complex light-and-shadow collages, interwoven with the poem, give this book the quality of an extraordinary world between worlds.
Brandon Kreitler comes from Arizona. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Award. He lives in New York City, where he writes and teaches English.
Lindsay Packer’s work ranges from writing to collage and kinetic installations. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India, where she studied and documented ephemeral imagery. Light, shadow and wonder have been part of her work ever since she made the move from Bangalore to Brooklyn, where she currently tends to her window boxes and her large collection of science textbooks from the 1950s. www.lindsaypacker.com
Posted by Iris Cushing, June 10th, 2012.
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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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Posted by Iris Cushing, January 28th, 2012.
Legs Tipped with Small Claws
by Joan Larkin
Hand-Sewn Chapbook / Sold-Out
In Legs Tipped with Small Claws, Joan Larkin’s first collection since My Body: New and Selected Poems, poems rich in the strangeness and struggle of the natural world have a way reordering the reader’s attention. From the eye of the plankton to the shell of the Red-Eared Slider, creatures – both human and animal – glow with the radiance of hard-won attention. The twenty poems that make up this small collection are meant to be savored and lived with for a very long time.
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Posted by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, January 28th, 2012.
