Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on miniature and maximum scales.Sayumi Kamakura’s poems marry accessible language with complex images, inviting readers to participate in their meaning. She often juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on both miniature and maximum scales. The paradoxical frictions in her work resolve into moments of lucidity just as often as they perplex. Although she writes in the haiku tradition, her poems detour from the conventional parameters for haiku, such as syllabic restrictions and the use of a fixed seasonal reference. Her flexible approach to the long-standing form allows her to explore new emotional frequencies across a range of subject matter. The book’s four sections—everyday life in Japan, experiences in Morocco and Italy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and reflections on the pandemic—reveal the preoccupations of a poet invested in rendering her experiences with a mix of traditional and contemporary motifs alongside a subtle wit. The natural world is always close at hand. Yet, Kamakura uses environmental phenomena not merely to depict the world, but to create moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.
Poems that in their content and form simultaneously expand the boundaries of language and delight.Oh Eun’s poetry is characterized by genius wordplay, and in From Being to Being, he plays with homophones, homonyms, and various other devices while keeping the wit, criticalness, and beauty of the Korean language. Oh Eun is one of the most esteemed poets in Korea, yet his work has never been translated into English before now. This landmark publication will allow English-language readers to discover new endeavors and innovations in Korean literature.
Crane is at once a hybrid-form elegy and a poetic meditation on liminality and flux, envisioning the threshold as a site saturated both with violence and with possibilities for living otherwise. Interweaving distilled prose and shardlike verse, Crane reexamines of two figures from Greco-Roman myth: Cardea, the little-known goddess of hinges, and Echo, the nymph whose body is transformed into reflective sound. Constellating personal narrative, etymological fragments, critical theory, and meditations on language, the book’s first section unearths a poetics of the hinge. The second section, “Delay Figure,” investigates the relationality of sound, the affective capacities of the nonlinguistic voice, and the dissolution of the desiring body, taking as its guiding figure the aural phenomena of echoes as well as their mythological personification. The book’s final section, “Inlet,” is a striking sequence of lyric poems that revolve around questions of time, detritus, and transformation, tracing ellipses of intimacy and illness, duration and ecological precarity.
Our Human Shores explores living in the Anthropocene, the ecological disasters life faces, and the barriers and inequality society faces in trying to create a better and livable world.Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics. Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse.Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity through extinction.
An acclaimed “poet’s poet” with deadpan wit and a gift for lyric innovation reveals an entirely new side of Korean contemporary poetry.This debut English-language collection by Shin Hae-uk offers up poems that rebel against the thin boundaries between self and others, human and object, speaker and addressee. These poems inhabit the voices of houses, colors, planets, childhood friends; they know the manic spunk of a good day and the dizzy lethargy of a bad memory. In this kaleidoscopic collection, Shin broke open for a generation of young poets the possibilities of time, tense, and speaker. Critics in her home country praise her as a prophet of the post-human, asking what is it like to exist and feel—as a dead animal, as a sound, as someone else’s memory. But for all its philosophical intelligence, Shin’s poetry is also funny, friendly, and sometimes even snarky, full of jagged left turns and mood changes. Shin knows what it’s like to feel you can be three different people within three minutes. These quirky, clever poems are for everyone who has ever shared that feeling.
A sensory-rich collection of poems that conjures magical worlds that combine the gorgeous imaginings of child’s play with the mystery of dark fairy tales.A lyric meditation on childhood, adulthood, parenting, grief, fear, and joy, The Sisters is a book of prose poems that began as bedtime stories. A kaleidoscopic invocation of imagined lives, these poems transform familiar myths, fables, and fairy tales into whimsical worlds that are a bit more fragile and bit more true. Through a series of prose poems, The Sisters confronts what it means to raise children and grow up amid climate catastrophes, insistent threats of gender-based violence, and the shocks of late-stage capitalism. These are ethereal and eerie stories full of torn edges, a series of dazzling lullabies that will soothe you awake.
A collection of 29 ecopoetic vignettes that explore the complexities of politics and progress in the Global South.Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009. The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
Dandelion fences, twine wires, shoebox roses: Savich's fanciful, stark meditations showcase the momentary and the momentous. Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet's latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an "ethics of deciding to see." Momently stays alert to "the language you can stand when you can't stand language," cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us "here, where not even ruin lasts."
From the co-publisher of acclaimed poetry press Omnidawn, Risk engages directly with limitations, both those that structure the literal form of the poems and literary form and those that are both unavoidable and self-inflicted.In Risk, award-winning poet Rusty Morrison uses a constraining form of seven-syllable segments with breaks between to explore questions of limitation. In these poems, she is not just writing about constraints, but living inside and seeing how to manage them. In this way, the speaker of these poems actively experiences limitations as event, not aftermath. Drawing on the idea of philosopher and critic Hélène Cixous who writes that "the border makes up the homeland, it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke," in Risk Morrison aims where the border and framings she uses offer understanding and where boundaries should be pushed against and passed beyond, as frightening as that might be.
Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics.These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized "repetitions" chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.The poems of Lee Sumyeong's Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee's writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite-a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.
The debut collection from Bill Knott that influenced a generation of poets and rockstars is now back-in-print for the first time in almost 60 years and includes a new introduction by Richard Hell. Bill Knott's first book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, was written under the pen name St. Geraud, the fictional persona of "a virgin and a suicide" who allegedly died two years prior to publication. The Naomi Poems was received to great acclaim and brought him to the attention of such poets as James Wright, who called Knott an "unmistakable genius." It also went on to inspire generations of fellow writers-from James Tate to Mary Ruefle to Denis Johnson. While first editions have become treasured collector's items today, and its poems mixed and remixed into numerous anthologies over the decades, The Naomi Poems is finally available in its original form for the first time since its original publication. "Bill Knott writes stunning poems in which he wires the head to the heart in such surprising ways that the results are truly electrifying. More than anyone of his generation, he shows us just how wild American poetry can be."-Billy Collins"There's no other poet like Bill Knott."-Yusef Komunyakaa
A debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore diasporic experience.In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo (or “song form”) of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Within diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from the history of the Roma in Spain, flamenco performance, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song.
A collection of poems that gives new life and magic to the everyday. Radio Days offers a unique collection by Ha Jaeyoun in a distinct, clear style, distinguishing it from her previous works in English. Although her poems range widely in topic, they are united by lucid language and breathtaking imagery. Through vivid impressions of humid childhood summers, Radio Days is an extended meditation on the heartbreak of growing up and being alive. Together, the poems create a whimsical, quietly unsettling, and nostalgic universe that is easily entered while refusing to make obvious statements on loss and love.
In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an "original shade." In failing to find what he's looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking, It's not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.
First English-language collection from a leading poet in South Korea. Kim Haengsook is one South Korea's most eminent contemporary poets, but a complete collection of her poems has never appeared in English before now. This selection draws on her work across her career and five books in Korean. Haengsook's poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring. Built out of a language that incorporates a strategy of what she calls "precise ambiguity," her work radiates outward like great waves whose philosophical rhythm you can't help but get caught in.
Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in the belly of the whale, and in that darkness, Wail Song asks readers how deep they are willing to wade in the water with blackness. The poems of Chaun Webster assume the world is not enough and is straining through each syllable, and with the end of the world in the rearview, they demand what we might do in blackened flesh with the time that remains.
Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal âIâ? to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.
Some of the poems have been published in translation in English-language journals such as Asymptote and TinderBox Poetry, which have been increasing interest in Shin's work.Shin is very well-known and established in South Korea and will be a recognizable name to those familiar with contemporary Korean literature.Taps into an ongoing interest in Asian literature in translation.
Lyrically inventive, ekphrastic poems that interrogate art, race, and humanityâ¿s dark history. These poems stress the weight of what it means to speak from and in an already âknownâ? world. In this debut collection from Keith Jones, the opening poems tarry with and think alongside the paintings of Cy Twombly. If Twombly is a painter of the Middle Sea, this song series conjures the longue durée of the Middle Passage. The poems then turn to resituate a âyouâ? and âIâ? in a world, our world, disfigured by false and deathly approximations of the âhuman.â? Perched on the jagged-edge of how many known and unknown catastrophes, how do we remake, rethink, reimagine, repair in language and act our relations to one another and to the earth? In the thinking and feeling of these poems, the great recursive swirling arcs of Twomblyâ¿s painterly line recur and intersect. Beyond the materiality of Twomblyâ¿s paint, beyond the materiality of the poem, we arrive at a profound place of thought, a kind of state, perhaps a republic of many worlds, alive to all our relations and how much they matter.
"This is a threat." That's how Hackers, Swedish writer Aase Berg's seventh book of poetry, begins. Hackers is a furious, feminist book about wanting to "hack" the patriarchal system-both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the 'hag' behind the 'hack,' channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg "hags" back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence. The fury of the hacker/hag/captive/revenger is constantly boiling up on the edges of Berg's compounds and highways, threatening to infiltrate the center. In these spectacular battle scenes and hacked pastorals, where nature is besieged by the highways of progress and the animals don't give a damn about the humans, the hag rises.
Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.
"The thing about killing is, like everything else, it feels as bright as love for just a flash." The second volume in Zachary Schomburg's Fjords series of evocative prose poetry, this is a collection that engages with dreams and a complicated and ever-evolving relationship with death. These poems bring together vivid and unexpected imagery-"a tiny light-pink fruit fly, the hot breath of a bear"-while pulling you deep into the mind of Schomburg, where thoughts like "finding a pair of scissors on the moon, or when I die, noticing my death notice me" are just part of the life that inhabits the inlets of the imagination.
Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow."The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around."--Publishers Weekly"Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other."--James Tate"Zachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days."--Matthew Rohrer"It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Rene Char and Pablo Neruda come most viv
This debut collection in English from Korean poet Moon Bo Young insists that you, as a reader, put down your expectations of what should be important or serious. While these poems are about god, death, love, and literature, they are also just as much about a hat with a herd of cows on it, science experiments on monkeys' attention, the eating of cherry tomatoes, weeping carrots, and pimple popping. The surrealism and humor in these poems allow them to travel so far in the span of a stanza. Reading this book is like going on a picnic with your weirdest best friend and asking them what-if questions until the sun goes down-there's room for everything, from dark anecdotes to funny quips and surprising vulnerability. This book is like that: there's room for everything. Skillfully rendered by award-winning translator Hedgie Choi, this is a book that will change the way you think about what a poem can accomplish.
For Nathan Hoks, a poem is a verbal nest, a weave of various scraps and strands inside of which something incubates. In Nests In Air, he makes this definition manifest by blending research of animals' nest making habits with poetic forms that create vivid imaginative spaces. Structured sets of four poems followed by suites of four images, the poems and images weave together, creating a nest of sorts. These poems are personal and political, social, and ecological, marked by conflict, contradiction, and uncertainty. Open the book and enter a space where "the slippery outline that haunts the soap / And the twisty timeline ghost-riding through me."
Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology-luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey-Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book.Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations."Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark."--China Mieville"Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries.... When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts."--Asa Beckman
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