In his first English-language collection, Moroccan-Dutch poet Mustafa Stitou marks his position as one of the most important poets of his generation.Two Half Faces collects work from across Stitou's career as he grapples in his poetry with his position in a changing reality. Stitou brilliantly parlays his relationship with his two homelands into a chronicle of identity, producing a vital account of cultural friction in poems that range from narrative to lyrical. Humor and seriousness go hand in hand, and the everyday combines with the surreal and the sublime to form a vibrant tension. This collection charts Stitou's progress as a poet of emotion and intellect, one who poignantly illuminates the ambiguities of cultural identities, and the intersections of our inner and outer worlds.

Two Half Faces

Literature & Fiction

Stitou, Mustafa

History & Criticism

Phoneme Media

A moving lyric meditation on the Congo River that explores the identity, chaos, and wonder of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as race and the detritus of colonialism. 
With The River in the Belly, award-winning Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila seeks no less than to reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages. Through his invention of the “solitude”—a short poetic form lending itself to searing observation and troubled humor, prone to unexpected tonal shifts and lyrical u-turns—the collection celebrates, caresses, and chastises Central Africa’s great river, the world’s second largest by discharge volume. 
Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Soviet history, Congolese popular music, international jazz, and everyday life in European exile, Mwanza Mujila has fashioned a work that can speak to the extraordinary hopes and tragedies of post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo while also mining the generative yet embattled subject position of the African diasporic writer in Europe longing for home. 
Fans of Tram 83 will discover in River the same incandescent, improvisatory verbal energy that so dazzled them in Mwanza Mujila’s English-language debut.

The River in the Belly

MWANZA MUJILA, Fiston

Poetry

Review\nWinner of the 2019 Grand Poetry Prize of the Netherlands 
Winner of the Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize 
Winner of the C Buddinhh’ Prize 
Winner of the Awater Poetry Prize 
Winner of the Herman de Coninck Prize "Radna Fabias’s Habitus, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, astonishes with a measured unruliness. The reader is energetically flung through space by the irregular stanza breaks, enjambment, and narrative trajectories that feel fresh and unpredictable. Yet even with the zigzagging through time and space, Fabias’s authoritative voice steers us through critiques of the nation-state’s ongoing violence, showing us how such violence disguises itself as white generosity." —Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation 
“Radna Fabias practices her craft in the spirit of strangers and strangeness, liberty and lyricism, truth and transience.” —Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews 
“Radna Fabias’s debut collection Habitus advances geographically, temporally, and thematically—almost narratively—yet at the same time feels resonantly still, as though each line echoes the entire collection.” —Action Books 
“I was stunned and thrilled by these poems. They have a confident, clear, strange, wild energy, along with the rage and wisdom and humor of a soul who understands the terrors and beauties of this world. They are the electric record of an exceptional imagination. I love these poems and can’t wait to see what’s next.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry and Father’s Day 
"If lucky, readers get drawn into a language; at best, they get pulled into a new world. The 35-year-old poet Radna Fabias provides an exceptional ‘at best’ case. Fabias does what readers hope a poet can do: she does not just throw language and thoughts at you; she draws you into her world. The opening poem of her collection Habitus starts with an appropriate image: shiny wheel rims, flawlessly polished and too big and expensive for the cars to which they are attached. It’s fitting, because what follows is speed: 115 mesmerizing, generous, sensory, playful, daring pages. She introduces the reader to the Dutch Antilles, to perforce powerful women, and to the peril that always lurks around the corner. All of this haunts Fabias, such that she must write poetry about it: she speaks of “the inability to amputate my cultural background from my identity.” And it haunts the reader. […] The Jury reached a consensus quite quickly and agreed: What a gift, this Habitus, and what a winner for the Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize!" ––Jury Report, Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize 
“What transforms this poetry into great poetry is its momentum and rhythm, the wealth of its images and its nuanced vision on human existence." ––Piet Gerbrandy, Versopolis Poetry\nSubversive, visual, and bold, Curaçao-born Dutch Radna Fabias’ explosive debut collection Habitus marks the entry of a genre-altering poet. Habitus is a collection full of thrilling sensory images, lines in turn grim and enchanting which move from the Caribbean island of Curaçao to the immigrant experience of the Netherlands. Fabias’ intrepid masterpiece explores issues of racism, neo-colonialism, poverty, and sexism with a heartbreaking rhythm and endless nuance. 
Broken into three parts (“View with coconut,” “Rib,” and “Demonstrable effort made”), Habitus explores the profound struggles of melancholic longing, womanhood, religion, and migration. This ambitious, powerful, and compassionate collection has emerged, cheering on ambiguity, fluidity, and a lyrical ego on a quest to find its home.

Habitus

Fabias, Radna

The poems in Jenei's collection Always Different: Poems of Memory grapple with childhood, memory, and time. The poet looks back forty years and imagines himself as a boy--the narrator of the poems--looking forward into the future. Thus the poems combine moments with sweeps of time, village scenes with rumblings of societal and technological change. In the tradition of Hungarian writers Péter Nádas and Ágota Kristóf, Jenei grapples with war and destruction, loneliness, desire, and loss. The literary historian Éva Bánki calls Jenei "one of the great masters of Hungarian free verse"--adding that his poems also hold an epic theme, "the strange underworld of the Kádár era, rural Hungary shown through a child's eye." Through their storytelling, searching, and rhythms, these poems take us into our communal yet private longing for self-knowledge, history, and home.

Always Different: Poems of Memory

Jenei, Gyula

In wondrous, singing translation by Mike Soto, these spare, striking poems by Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez explore the infinite solitude of the universe. The poems of Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez reflect a world precariously dependent on the word, but also transfixed by the word. They express a metaphysical shift where the laws of heaven and earth are suspended, transformed into a terrain of the journey inward, reflecting a cosmos of the self. The simplicity of these poems never fail to resonate, reflecting a profound investigation of the world on an elemental level. Ruiz-Pérez's poetry very often reads like the discovery of a formula, an algebra of poetic inquiry that draws together references to Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, and Alejandra Pizarnik. Deftly translated by poet Mike Soto, these poems express a singular vision of the abundance of the world as well as the void, but in these poems even the void is begged to speak.

Isles of Firm Ground

Ruiz-Pérez, Ignacio

Champion of Chinese classics and the growth of the Chinese poetic tradition, Song Lin is one of China's most innovative poets. When the Tiananmen protest exploded in Beijing in June 1989, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai and was imprisoned for almost a year before leaving China soon afterwards. This selection of poems, made by the translator Dong Li and the poet himself, spans four decades of poetic exploration, with a focus on poems written during the poet's long stay in France, Singapore, Argentina, and more recently, his return to China. As a result of his wanderings, Song Lin may be thought of as an international poet, open to an unusual extent to influences - though informed by the classics and a thorough study of the Chinese language, his poetry weaves through American, French, and Latin-American traditions. His influences are the modernists, the surrealists, the romantics, the deep imagists and the objectivists--but what distinguishes Song is his ability to absorb them all, and make them his own. From the experience of displacement and exile, his poetry continues to open and expand its horizons.

The Gleaner Song

Song, Lin

Winner of the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus, these experimental linked poem-threads move across time, linking a young Cypriot to ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants through striking, disparate polyphony. In this bilingual collection of linked poems, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early 20th Century Cyprus, 16th Century Scotland, a sailor on Christopher Columbus' ship La Pinta, and more. As the poem threads draw together, it is as if the protagonist, in his travels through the twentieth century, encounters Odysseus, Cervantes, Columbus, Rembrandt, and others, all moving in multidimensional synchronicity. In this way, the readers take part in the production of meaning by pulling the threads together, stitching together their own reading of the story. Through the reading of these threads, time remains fluid, creating a masterful declaration about the function of poetry: perhaps history is nothing more than the presence of innumerable human voices, some more and some less powerful, coexisting in an eternal present.

Time Stitches: Poems

Kefala, Eleni

When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me

DEVI, Ananda

The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan

Zongyuan, Liu

The Law of Conservation is a poetry collection intensely attuned to landscape, both geographic and metaphorical. Borders blurred as cities cede to rural land; the body as a changing place on an equally unstable map; the subsoil of sexuality; the terrain of memory, both rich and painful; new countries traveled and new roots set down as an adult, navigating desire, loneliness, and love. In the context of gender and sexual identity, Spada's work pays subtle, incisive attention to the inextricable relationship between transformation and conservation: transformation toward the experience of honoring and protecting our deepest and most abiding truths. At the same time, her poems also unsparingly explore the external shifts (in the speaker's surroundings and even her memories) that make it so challenging to retain an unassailable sense of self.

The Law of Conservation

Spada, Mariana

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