Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. This perfect-bound chapbook showcases Safiya Sinclair's immense talents across a wide variety of genres, including poetry, memoir, and literary essay. Eddie Baugh writes, "Her mythopoeic imagination thrives on startling metaphors and combinations of images. Eschewing the naturalistic and consolatory, the poetry is alive in disturbing implosions of consciousness, drawn to cataclysm and apocalypse, whether in personal or communal histories."

Catacombs

Literature & Fiction

Sinclair, Safiya

Poetry

Argos Books

Poetry. Women's Studies. Concrete Poetry. "Combine Apollinaire with Pam Grier and you might come close to Montana Ray's ferocious debut, (GUNS &amp; BUTTER). Each concrete poem is shaped like a gun and its poetic interiors are bracingly brutal and gorgeous. Capsuled in parentheticals, each magnetic phrase is locked and loaded as Ray burns holes into subjects ranging from interracial love, single motherhood, to America's unrelenting addiction to gun violence. Her voice is mesmerizing, tender, vicious, chimeric, as she veers between role-playing a warrior glock-wielding Annie Oakley to 'warm, new mother.' I love (GUNS &amp; BUTTER) and cannot sing it enough praises. It's the kind of rare first collection that is startling, necessary, and is truly like no other book."—Cathy Park Hong "...honest, sparse writing that is brazen and piercing as a bullet."—Publishers Weekly "With cohesive intelligence, not to mention pained hilarity, Ray recasts what is not only possible but endlessly delightful in Poetry."—Cate Marvin "Is she getting off on this? It's uncomfortable to read."—Joy Katz, American Poetry Review "This work reminds me that it's point of view that gives motherhood, violence, race, desire meaning beyond language. Nothing in things, except how held, by whom."—Simone White

(guns & butter)

Ray, Montana

Poetry. African American Studies. The haunting, haunted world revealed in Khadijah Queen's FEARFUL BELOVED stays with the reader in an uncomfortably pleasurable way, and heightens awareness of our own world's deep horrors and ordinary brilliance. Anyone who has been unable to shake the erotic brutality of, say, Sylvia Plath's Ariel will savor the 'bruisable monuments' that Queen offers. Here Queen crafts a language that unfolds along multiple axes (spatial, temporal, emotional, spiritual) and is experimental with form while remaining seamless, precise, and vivid. Addressing Fear head-on--'your spectrality exists,' she insists--Queen's FEARFUL BELOVED evidences the fierce intelligence of 'a body in its own time, possessed of itself.'

Fearful Beloved

Queen, Khadijah

History & Criticism

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. "This vital book exposes the dense tectonics churning beneath migrant dreams. Accusatory, loving, full of grief and sage truths, Athena Farrokhzad's WHITE BLIGHT speaks eloquently to the troubled inheritance of diasporic survival. Through a litany of terse voices, Jennifer Hayashida's sensitive translation describes the nexus of filial obligations and projections under which the narrator sinks from view. The intense beauty of devastation and the poignancy of betrayal emerge with startling frankness: 'Your family will never be resurrected like roses after a fire.' 'I have spent a fortune for your piano lessons / But at my funeral you will refuse to play.' These white lines make me ask, what has been bleached out in all of our stories? I read this book, and I remembered my humanity."—Sueyeun Juliette Lee Translator bio: Poet, translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed her M.F.A. in poetry from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent translation projects include Ida Börjel's Miximum Ca'Canny The Sabotage Manuals you cutta da pay, we cutta da shob (Commune Editions, 2014) and Karl Larsson's FORM/FORCE (Black Square Editions, 2015); previous work includes Fredrik Nyberg's A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), and Eva Sjödin's INNER CHINA (Litmus Press, 2005). She is Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

White Blight

Farrokhzad, Athena

Poetry. Art. Environmental Studies. Science Fiction. Scandinavian Studies. Translated by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Johannes Heldén. Johannes Heldén's ASTROECOLOGY begins from an eschatological place: the world as we know it is ending, and this cosmic ending can be witnessed in that most intimate and privileged of places, the private estate. ASTROECOLOGY finds us in a real house and a real garden, surrounded by endlessly meaningful details, arranged with the precision of a Twin Peaks-like murder mystery. In a series of filmic visual frames and corresponding textual notes, Heldén offers a poetics that twists the organic (plants, pets, decay and growth) and the inorganic (drones, data systems, AI) into each other as a kind of avant- garde Mobius strip. A dazzling intertexuality unfolds: Inger Christensen's indexical impulse meets Hayao Miyazaki's surrealism, Chris Marker's stark montage meets Robert Smithson's iconography, Ursula Le Guin's social investigation meets Norbert Weiner's theory of cybernetics. In letting the reader-viewer get "stuck in the stream of evolution" over and over again, Heldén brings us to profound unanswerable questions about the origins of the universe: its processes, systems, and vanishing species of creature and thought.

Astroecology

Helden, Johannes J

Poetry. "Ali Power's A POEM FOR RECORD KEEPERS is a long poem made of short poems that comes on like a deadpan phalanx system unlearning itself while crashing resignation into the boards and pulling the rug out from under certainty line by line. But certainty is not simply replaced by uncertainty; an angular, witty openness accumulates across Power's poem, making it excellent company. That openness also lends itself to the poem's capacity to build the kind of necessarily enigmatic space love requires to fend off the grinding mob- vacuum that is contemporary American life these days."—Anselm Berrigan  "You could compare the way A POEM FOR RECORD KEEPERS works to the ways other things work—locked-groove records, Lorine Niedecker's calendar poems, waves—but never for too long. As much as Ali Power's poetry delights in forward motion and real speaking, it also teaches you how to remain still and listen. This is an ingenious, biting, elegant book. To enter it is to feel squeezed by time and even (if you want to, as I did) by hope: 'Everything is just beginning.' It is, and it does. Then everything begins again, right here.—Mark Bibbins "The poet as one who maintains a history of one's activities. The poem as record, as in ledger, one entry per every other line, record as something we replay when it's a favorite. These lines now live in my head. They are strange enough to keep me on my toes, familiar enough to seem like they are talking about me and everyone I know. In fact, I do want to 'hang out' with this new book and its author."—Stacy Szymaszek

A Poem for Record Keepers

Power, Ali

The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

Spriggs, Bianca Lynne

Poetry. Women's Studies. Samantha Zighelboim's debut collection conducts a radical re-examination of what we mean by body. In these poems, body is noun, verb and adverb; body is dearly beloved and fiercely rejected; it is by turns a singularly beautiful process and a frightening object. Zighelboim takes the sonnet form as a loose premise, a la Bernadette Mayer, but then explodes, expands, defies and otherwise grows out of supposed formal limits, making language into a living embodiment of the refusal of (institutional, patriarchal, cultural) control. The poet's refusal of the social invisibility of fat bodies is essential. "I am a perfect fucking blossom," Zighelboim writes, and also "I am entitled to the loneliness of my interminable appetite." Offering felt registers as subtle as "The oblique / correspondence between / a soft body / and a thin / layer of / pulp," this is the writing of a sharp and observant world-eater: a cosmophage in the truest sense.

The Fat Sonnets

Zighelboim, Samantha

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. The sonically-hypnotic poems in this collection pry open the space between sounds and what they mean, and the violence of this prying is analogous to the ordinary violences that women live with the world over. "Orange you happy yet, a serious threat / a surfeit, a certain fate, a surer fret," Blitshteyn chants, and you find yourself wanting to feel her language on your tongue, even as that language evokes an unbearable reality. Wrapped up in these fiercely elegant poems are narratives of language acquisition, precarious immigrations, and song-like imperatives for the best kinds of destruction.

Two Hunters

Blitshteyn, Marina

Fiction. Latinx Studies. Translated by Noel Black. DOWN WITH GARGAMEL! is a futurist tale set in Puerto Rico, New York, and Colorado Springs that unfolds during the transition from peak oil production to a future that's formless, dangerous, and full of possibility. As global capitalism collapses under the weight of a worsening environmental crisis, we encounter the stories of six friends as they move through different forms of consciousness and across galaxies. Stories are presented as a narrative fractal in which the same occurrence is retold at different scales. Conversations abound: on black holes during a Puerto Rican blackout; inside the head of a schizophrenic professor; in an apartment in Brooklyn the very morning the world learns aliens have sent us a message; at a "happy death home" where three comrades and a cat care for twelve voluntarily dying bodies; and finally between intergalactic Smurfs and a nostalgic angel. Rosa's vision is at once absurd and terrifying, specific and idealistic, rooted in the paranoid tradition of J.L. Borges and Phillip K. Dick and inspired by a wide range of radical political movements.

Down With Gargamel!

Rosa, Luis Othoniel

United States

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