Böcker i Poets Out Loud-serien

NAMED THE BEST POETRY OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMESMy Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting¿that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent-a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born-and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next.

Julia Bouwsma (Author) Julia Bouwsma is the author of Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017).

"Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk Rossouw's Xamissa with such ecstatic stride as to match the intensity of human spectacle advancing the procession of Cape Town's history. The collective effect of alternating scenes and incantations reflect an ethical imperative of uncertainty. With formal ambition and acoustic scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past haunted by racial brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social unity and the durational "anyway" that poetry's historical imagination is able to contain."-Roberto Tejada"Both poetry and the capacity to recover history's untold cruelties find a home in Xamissa, the name 'crossed-out' beneath the one we know, 'Cape Town.' In Henk Rossouw's stunning collection of this name, crossed-out histories refuse their erasure, spill their liquid meaning, and reclaim the name that means 'place of sweet waters.' But because what you see when you look at this place is too easy at first, you might miss that its bright surfaces are like 'a beautiful wet bag over the mouth of.' Xamissa misses nothing."-Gabeba Baderoon, author of The Dream in the Next Body, A Hundred Silences, and The History of Intimacy"In Xamissa, Henk Rossouw's artistic vision isn't borne out of the tyranny of spontaneous epiphany, but rather is carefully fleshed out through a constructivist process of cultural excavation. Nimbly threading History's objects ('nation,' 'city,' 'self,' 'peoples'), Rossouw guides us into and out of Imperium's capture zones. The result is a lived-life global poetics where the harmonic modulation from nationalist myth-making to a newly invigorated drive for liberationist re-definition of 'citizenship,' makes for a dazzling music of our time."-Rodrigo Toscano Xamissa is a book-length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes. Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships came-the X of the title standing in for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant. A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa, Xamissa code-switches at times into Lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future. Henk Rossouw teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and other publications.

An electrifying feminist poetics combining language and visual collage to explore gender, landscape, taxidermy, and the idea of a ¿natural body¿An innovative book-length poem that delves into the intricacies of natural history dioramas, taxidermy, landscape, and women naturalists, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is an experience of looking for ¿Woman¿s Work¿ in American natural history museums. Why, for instance, have the contributions of taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell, the first person to create a ¿habitat group¿ display in the United States, and Delia Akeley, the wife of the ¿father of modern taxidermy,¿ been largely erased?Sarah Mangold mines language from natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s to explore the perception and the reception of women in male-dominated scientific pursuits, as well as the doctrine of nature as pure, unpopulated, and outside historical and political time. A stunning work of visual and textual collage, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners creates a vibrant textual ecology that utilizes language as landscape while reshaping notions of nature and the natural.