"Scatterplot navigates the landscape of imagination through a series of variations on being lost-and found. Koehn's investigations allow the failures of consciousness, the gaps in the knowable, as he grapples with a sensory terrain perceivable in the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. Here is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California Delta through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but requiring, love. The work diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and details about members of his family into a web of coordinates forming constellations of beauty and tragedy. From the music of Bad Brains to the life-cycle of the Tongue Eating Louse to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys to the talking poems of David Antin to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain - the work details both how this writer embraces the present, and takes responsibility for his insufficiencies and fiascos, in a world so full of imperfection one can't but both laugh and cry. In what amount to a mix of experiments - erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking/talking poems, and more - the delta between right now and forever seems inextricably present and pleasurably mixed. Wild vulnerability, infinitely odd observation, and uninhibited daring inhabit these poems"--
"Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building"--
As the title of The Not Forever suggests, these poems take not only mortality, but also the impossibility of truly assessing mortality, as their endlessly inexplicable subject.
Focusing on 21 works of prose from an esteemed poet, translator, and visual artist, this collection reflects an ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, as well as the aural and the visual.
"The poems in the book attempt to locate the slippery presence of silence in paintings and photographs, in the absences of bird sound, in ruin, pauses, and grief, and in the opaqueness of others and oneself. They address both the destruction behind some kinds of silence and the revitalizing possibilities in silent contemplation"--
The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections. In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fryâ¿s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit. Â
What happens when the faith and community we once held close sours into an experience of tragedy? In Since Sunday, we find a poet who is rebuilding a sense of faith after fleeing religious abuse. Doubt, shame, uncertainty, and the pains of loss create the ground from which these poems grow. After severance from her religion, established values, and sense of direction, Tomaselli embarks on recovery as an active and intentional pursuit. The poems reveal a resilience that must be lived as a daily effort to cope with trauma and to root oneself in the present. Through wit, vulnerability, and rich lyrical language, Tomaselli invites us to walk with her through loss and on to a persistent process of discovery. The poems chronicle a cultivation of awe, unearthing a fresh faith rooted in the present realness of everyday experiences. Stripped of the orthodoxy that both grew and crushed her, she reconstructs a new core of trust for herself. Here we learn with the poet to seek celebration in daily life and to foster a sense of beauty from the mundane.
"This book is a dark, 21st-century fairytale set to music, short attentions spans, and long, shared familial memories. The narration takes place inside a Black, female body more attached to and comfortable with outside narratives, lyrics, stories, dreams, aspirational relationships, and images, than herself. Once she turns down the noise, she discovers boundaries, real and perceived, societal and self-imposed, and the horrific and wonderful things that can happen when they are breached"--
"The poems that comprise Variations on Dawn and Dusk are best considered as a single inquiry broken into discrete parts--they don't build exactly one upon another, they aren't a progressive series, but each is a meditation gathered around fundamental points of concern: light, dark, sky, cloud, faith, doubt, thought, care, memory, dust, and more. The project as a whole is meant as an imitation of so deep it becomes a participation in Robert Irwin's untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX"--
The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and--especially in the United States--reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal's three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It's only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself--and a turn to its affirmation of life.
This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems. In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn't treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation. Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolina opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.
"Jason Bayani's second book of poems, Locus, centers the post-1965 Immigration Act Filipinx in America. Weaving his way through the muddled recordings of history and personal memory, Bayani looks to tell a story of migrant bodies, the impermanence of home, and how one learns to find themself in the transient states of the experienced and mythologized America"--
A series of filmic poems examining historical and fictional relationships
An ekphrastic series of poems that troubles and illuminates embodiment and encounter
An environmentalist military coming-of-age story askance of the real
A deconstruction of identity and embodiment and a manifesto of becoming
A series of prayers, laments, and lullabies addressing our current migration crises
Poetic iterations of what Amiri Baraka called the blues impulse, attending to an "inside song" that "could bring people in"
"As iZ is a tripartite lyric (Pharmacy, To Market and Library), a multi-prong investigation into the relationship between the West and East, the entangled networks among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the dynamics among Islamic practices and pre-Islamic cultures. It is, in this sense, a meditation on the vacillation between between-ness and among-ness, the two and the many, and the desire to escape both two-ness and many-ness into the singularity of one on the way to extinction, the bone at zero." --
Sometimes collage essay, sometimes daybook, sometimes poetry, Day Counter offers snapshots of daily life¿at home, in the workplace, and within the societal (often politically-charged) meeting-grounds we all navigate¿that contemplates concepts of naming, distance between speaker and experience, and dissonance of reality through a vernacular directness that is underwired with formal control. Permeating the work is an awareness of the arrival of a never-certain next thing, balanced in an architecture that is poised upon the potential premise of its own collapse.
Place-Discipline lyricizes 21st century subjectivity as the byproduct of, and resistance to, global capitalism¿s necropolitics and the encroachment of occult financial industries and vectoralism on the human¿s right to chaotic embodiment and trans-formation. Taking its title from Sun Ra¿s 1972 album, Discipline 27-II, Moctezuma¿s book explores hybridity, hyphenation, and heliocentric border-crossing as possible alternatives to the darkening ¿white magic¿ of cognitive capitalism and cultural gentrification. At once a disquisition on the economics of austerity and a response to the enforced scarcity in our rights to spectral identity, difference, and translanguaging, Place-Discipline seeks to bypass the binary code of depoliticization by reaching the plateau of an enunciation which speaks through fracture, and which sings through DuSablean absence.
Topical poems that present the life of the mind--mourning and celebrating who and what is lost as time goes by
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