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Poetry. Art. "'I'm dressed like a Jamestown cannibal / In a city of mistake babies with e-cash, ' writes Amling in an astute and challenging debut collection that's both deeply poignant and darkly humorous. Like a deadpan oracle or font of offbeat wisdom you didn't know you needed to know, Amling acts as a guide through the ersatz Epicureanism of contemporary America, where 'freedom still remains monetary.' He opens with a brief series of poems that are composed of cuts and outtakes 'Like a polygraph of a satellite' that serves as a junkyard ars poetica. A visual artist adept in the medium of collage, he expresses these poems as social critique delivered through a signal scrambler. But his c...
Poetry. "Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book'll make you bloom"--Graham Foust.
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Studies. Film. SAVAGE PAGEANT recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, SAVAGE PAGEANT reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect--I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode."--Jameson Fitzpatrick
Lucas de Lima's TROPICAL SACRIFICE is a wishbone against a fascist heart/a prophetic, dream-filled narrative based on the spiritual journey of a chicken. TROPICAL SACRIFICE is a wishbone against a fascist heart/a prophetic, dream-filled narrative based on the spiritual journey of a chicken. Used for sacrificial ritual in Afro-Brazilian religion, the chicken becomes a re-enchantment of the poet's ancestry. Her superior vision gives access to histories of genocide and ecocide, opening a portal to Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, queer and nonhuman worlds. From the favela to the Amazon to the astral plane, it is the half-winged bird who escapes the factory farm, inviting voices to bleed out of the sky.
Poetry. Comics. "'All objections to progress,' writes Hans Blumenberg, 'could come down to the fact that it hasn't yet taken us far enough.' That's philosophy—and it's funny—but no one would ever level the same complaint at pain or laughter, this fine book's subjects and two phenomena that can take human beings great distances almost immediately. Absolutely modern—but never resolutely maudlin—Sommer Browning doesn't settle for making it new; rather, she lets it bleed and gets us there on time."—Graham Foust
Poetry. Women's Studies. Populated by the quotidian events and things that punctuate our days (air travel, medical exams, bathrooms, phones, etc.), the poems in Niina Pollari's DEAD HORSE are anything but common. Hyperaware, the speaker in these poems "watch es] you watch me." She is mercurial, monstrous "a vampire in a grayly coughing dawn," a lover who wants to put her "thigh meat next to yours," to sit with swan's blood inside her mouth and smile but also tender in her grotesqueness: "I'm nothing / But a massive garbage mountain / Wiggling abundantly / And all I want to know is / Do you love me? / Now that I can dance." And then there it is, that word love. That is the force that ultimate...
Poetry. "Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile." Thurston Moore "'I wanted to be high, but now I'm trapped in my life.' Frustrated by the limits of his world, PARTYKNIFE's youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. 'Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am.' These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life." Sarah Manguso "PARTYKNIFE is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren't allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, 'the future.'" Blake Butler"
Ana Božičević's second full-length poetry collection is a revolutionary book and an ars poetica for the polis in which she excludes nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family and friends, she is at ease employing both the universal political statement and the lyric "I." A Croatian émigré, Božičević approaches the English language with a playful objectivity, bouncing back and forth from the conversational to the grand: "This is the whitest shit / I've ever written" she notes in her half-myth "About Nietzsche." Her critique of our time and place is at once empathetic and crude, tender and grotesque. Lucky for us, "beauty [wins] in all its casual terror and pain." Ana Božičević was born in Zagreb, Croatia. She emigrated to the United States in 1997 and lives in New York City. Stars of the Night was her first book of poems.
Poetry. R E D is an erasure of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A long poem in 27 chapters, R E D excavates from Stoker's text an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage while wrestling with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.