Böcker utgivna av Operating System - Kin(d)* Texts and Projects

In Still Rooms is more than a haunted house novel—a strange hybrid drawing its aesthetic equally from ancient Greek drama, ecopoetics, and the Gothic tradition. Set in an old house in rural East Tennessee, three generations of a Greek-American family mourn the loss of a matriarch who reveals herself to each of them uniquely. Regardless of the family's comings and goings, the reader remains always in the house. In this house, religion, mythology, and superstition all rule equally. In this house, saints speak to mothers from their plaques on the wall; ancient deities manifest in the minds of children; a Chorus of those who have previously died there address the reader directly; and ultimately, the house itself begins to speak.

"'Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien' brilliantly expands the conversation on undocumented migration by tracing the legacy of illegality. Claiming 'every crossing becomes mine,' Alan Pelaez Lopez, as fugitive alien, bravely takes on the task of traveling across galaxies to reach an elsewhere that is something more like a new holding. Against the failure of political language, this book of multimedia poems becomes a verb, an active imagining that takes the banality of papers and transforms it into poetry. This intergalactic traveling brings the 'Black NDN' migrant touchingly back to their mother’s arms, and to her vision for life. If illegality is to be their legacy, Alan reimagines that illegality as both disruptive of settler-futures and productive for black and indigenous futures. We should be immensely grateful for this vision."––Javier O. Huerta, author of 'American Copia: An Immigrant Epic' "This is a stunning book. It’s history, it’s their story, it’s an archive and a hard drive with a playful vibe. Its sense of humor girds and grounds and gallops around the gravity of law and belonging and erasure and choosing words and narratives and modes that were made without people like us in the room. It revels in colonial language as it tells that language to sit the f down. There’s a new b on the scene. Take note and pay your respects."––Tommy Pico, author of 'Feed'----Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is an experimental poetry collection that renders an intimate portrait of growing up undocumented in the United States. Through the use of collages,  photographs, emails, and immigration forms, Alan Pelaez Lopez formulates theories of fugitivity that position the Trans*Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. Although themes of isolation and unbelonging are at the forefront of the book, the poet doesn’t see belonging to U.S. society as a liberatory practice. Instead, Pelaez Lopez urges readers to question their inheritance and acceptance of “settler rage, settler fear, and settler citizenship,” so that they can actively address their participation in everyday violences that often go unnoticed. As the title invokes, Intergalactic Travels breaks open a new galaxy where artists of color are the warriors that manifest the change that is needed not only to survive, but thrive. ----- Excerpts appear at:Pittsburgh Poetry ReviewVinyl PoetryGemstone ReadingsBozaltaA Quiet Courage

Recommended by Ms. Magazine as an August 2019 featured title!"To enter Berry Grass' Hall of Waters is to agree to a deep-sea excavation through baths that are simultaneously familiar yet foreign. Grass is your guide-pen light in hand, illuminating darknesses that cause the light to refract back upon the reader and author. In Missouri, there are no natural lakes-instead, they are created by dam construction; the water cutting a swath through the trees. The springs, however, are believed to be true blue, as Grass says, 'And it's all so healthy, isn't it? So restorative? To soak in our nature's superior water and pretend that superiority is therefore our nature. To pretend that the concept of natural is natural.' Hall of Waters is an examination of how America loves to be undisturbed after claiming what it believes to be theirs, and how Grass finds a way to reclaim identity while still carrying traces of the fountains of the past."--Brian Oliu, author of So You Know It's Me "We forget that one product of fire's burning is water. And Berry Grass' searing and far-seeing, tetrahedral and tenderhearted micro memoirs set in the osmotic membrane of the Middle Border, Hall of Waters, re-minds us of these fused and confused outcomes at the core of the combustion of cognition. There is nothing I can think of akin to the elemental chemistry of this book. It is sublime, yes, but in its exquisitely rendered prose it rewrites (and rights) the valences that bond us to the place of place and the us of us. This water is 'hard' water indeed, but in the dissolved solids one finds a balm, a welling, a source, and a baptism all drenched and drenching in liquid fire."--Michael Martone, Author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding HALL OF WATERS is an attempt to demythologize the rural American Midwest through the specific example of the author's hometown, Excelsior Springs, MO. Through lyric essay & memoir, the book seeks to examine & undercut the inherent settler white supremacy of the Midwestern small-town, to deromanticize the nostalgia for land & place that is the hallmark of Midwestern art, & to think about what it was like growing up queer & trans in such a toxic environment. excerpts appear at: The Wanderer Tiny Mag Phoebe Journal Diagram The Fanzine The Map is Not