Richard Hell's new poems are interspersed with images created for the book by Christopher Wool. Hell's 2019 valedictory of an essay, "Falling Asleep," which asserts his dreamy conclusions regarding the nature of reality, and "Chronicle," a list drawn from his recent years' notebooks, complete the collection. Kentucky native Richard Meyers dropped out of high school and moved to New York to be a poet, but after a few years of writing and editing poems and pamphlets and literary magazines he decided-in 1972-to change his name to Hell and sing and write songs in a rock and roll band instead. He still wrote poems at times but didn't want to be seen as a "rock poet," so he underplayed that part of his story. After 10 years and the impact of "punk," which D.I.Y. movement Hell had a lot to do with triggering, he left music behind too, in favor of fiction and journalism. He hasn't published a proper book of new poems until now, 50 years later. Nearly all the poems in What Just Happened were written during the 2020-2021 pandemic. The poems are accompanied by an essay on the subject of "Falling Asleep," which condition Richard proposes as being the closest humans get to a direct experience of reality, and the book closes with "Chronicle," an 88-entry list of observations, eruptions and goofs. || "We always knew Richard Hell was a poet, and that he was one long before he became a rock star and fashion icon. What surprises about his new poems is the density of thought they compress into their apparently casual sleeves. They join with his ars poetica, 'Falling Asleep,' to form a sustained conversation with uncertainty, making peace with the idea that life has no meaning." ---Lucy Sante

What Just Happened

Arts & Photography

Hell, Richard

Music

Winter Editions

At once a log of pandemic life in New York City and a meditation on selfhood, memory, and language, Emily Simon's first book is a lyrical and timely experiment in prose fragments. In Many Ways describes a self in process, at odds, and enthralled, in search of the origins of her unsatisfiable pursuit of meaning. The writerly drive to fix the fleeting moment comes up against a contradictory impulse to escape-through writing-the binds of formal codes and conventions. Simon's shifts and disjunctions map the unsteady flow of pandemic time, observing the clash of interior experience with the social world. || "Reminiscent of a personal journal kept by a brilliant writer, Emily Simon's debut is a stunning compendium of intriguing and astute observations, rich musings on literature, and anecdotal fragments of memories of love and life. Sharp, witty, heartfelt, and alarmingly thought-provoking, In Many Ways is unique in form, profound of mind, fiercely intelligent, and the prose is jaw-droppingly exquisite." --Binnie Kirshenbaum || "'Embarrassment is a lesson in size.' Emily Simon's In Many Ways pursues the tributaries of embarrassment through daily life and discovers ways to walk beside them. 'Ecstasy,' she reminds us, is 'a condition of standing beside oneself.' Her candor moves us and moves, I think, herself-in this book we feel the writer is taking herself into confidence. We listen, lucky, like a trinket on the desk, like someone who too must survive and think the quotidian, its pulsing dulling sharpening depleting soaring never-arrivingness. A lovely work of writing at the pace of living." --Hilary Plum || "In Many Ways shows us that, like love, truth isn't a fact, but rather it is a willingness to become disoriented. Unafraid to tack with the wind, these fragments unfold asymptotically as they perform the kind of politics they urgently call for.'" --Rosie Stockton

In Many Ways

Literature & Fiction

Simon, Emily

Literary

Blending ecopoetics, ghost story, and sci-fi thriller, Garth Graeper's first book of poems imagines survival in a world where nature, time, and identity are unstable and predatory. Inspired by sources as wide-ranging as Tarkovsky's Stalker, the comic book character Swamp Thing, and Romantic visionary Dorothy Wordsworth, The Sky Broke More abounds with transmogrifications. Teetering between intimacy and apocalypse, no body, or tree, or sound stays intact for long. No sooner exorcized from a ghostly possession in the Lake District, the reader is driven back into the water cycle, raining down from the sky to feed plants, or reawakened from a dream, trying to grasp a hand, to remember a face. In this ecosystem, where "caught between tall lilacs / bodies spill," green meadows offer less a bucolic backdrop than a site of aggressive reclamation. Propelled by terse language and thorn-sharp images, these poems blur lines between inside and out, challenge anthropocentric notions of self, and explore the volatile space between companionship and competition in an age of dwindling resources. || "The poems in The Sky Broke More document the difficult work of listening and the powerful attunement it achieves-with our beloveds, with the natural world, with the dead. Graeper's taut lyric braids human and terrestrial sound and sensation-heartbeat and howling, voice and storm, breath and birdsong-into something both beautiful and unsettled: 'a density of voices so absolute, you may hear it as silence.' " --Nancy Kuhl | "The earth of these poems is sincere and erotic, fraught with the unraveling of bodies in human damage, yet sounding to heal with each tone. Their care is impressive, and gorgeous. Insistently tactile, communicative, Graeper's "wild need- / song" threads its ear through prose and verse with equal skill. As though holding Ceravolo to ear, the poet sounds (Dorothy) Wordsworth. Bring your heart close to the moss, travel the worm road, on tones beneath tones, 'holy mouth- / to-mouth from under / the mud.' Finding music in language, The Sky Broke More offers gift of passage in dark times." --Jonathan Skinner

The Sky Broke More

Graeper, Garth

Poetry

The fiftieth-anniversary edition of New York School poet Lewis Warsh's long out-of-print translation of a major poem by Robert Desnos, pillar of French Surrealism, presented alongside the original text. 
Desnos's NIGHT OF LOVELESS NIGHTS--written in tribute to legendary French chanteuse Yvonne George in 1926--is a maelstrom of romantic despair, political upswell, and psychedelic irony. John Ashbery's claim that Frank O'Hara 1971 collected poems was "the founding of a new tradition" should be made for both Desnos's poem and Warsh's translation. Long unavailable, Warsh's Desnos stands beside Ron Padgett's Cendrars and John Ashbery's Rimbaud, a sublime translation experiment of letting the language speak for itself--as had the poem's author. Originally published in 1973 by poet and translator David Rosenberg in The Ant's Forefoot chapbook series, Warsh's translation is reproduced in this fiftieth anniversary edition alongside the French original, and with an afterword by Rosenberg. 
"Warsh's translation of Desnos's dream-chant-poem-cloud testifies to translation as a mode of reading: we can only translate what we can read. Now side by side with Desnos's French, we see how Warsh alters words, misses pronouns, creates new visions out of the original at times but always captures its incantatory rhythm and beauty and starfulness, the grandeur of its lament.… Around him fifty years ago, poetry translators were mostly academics and translation was a way to grasp a work already seen as past. Warsh, poet, translates Desnos to bring the poem into the present, his present and ours, feverishly alive, as poem not of the past but of the future. It is wonderful to have this celebratory volume and admire his work fifty years later."--Erín Moure 
"Lewis Warsh, always a delicate and romantic poet, writes with the speed of intuition. He captures in his translation of Desnos the same music, almost arbitrary in its liberties. Night is a cloak to compose such poetry in. And so it adapts to the conditions it is given, dark and wicked only to match the world at its worst … The poems here are like silhouettes dashing out of the past and passing. A sparkling and taunting dance before the shadow of Hitler takes form."--Fanny Howe 
"Desnos caught his night stunningly in formal and luxurious French pressing hard on Avant breakthrough, addressing the lover in tantalizing lament, flourishing insomniacal language. He suffered Nazi murder and I think Warsh, in his translation--a young evolving poet's tender cri de coeur on the back of Desnos--felt spirit connection to the Jewish poet. The new afterword by its original publisher, David Rosenberg, is a generous and brotherly asset. I love and lived this poem's untethered shadowing."--Anne Waldman 
"Robert Desnos was thirty the year The Night of Loveless Nightswas first published. Lewis Warsh was very near the same age when he rendered it into English. Warsh was so in accord with Desnos's long, passionate work that his own version is as expressive as any poem he ever wrote."--John Godfrey 
"Desnos's poem, in Lewis's translation, must have influenced us all with its structural changes--stanzas, then none to speak of, prose interlude, line lists, then lovely curt goodbye. Its sense of a corrupt teeming world in which the only pure image exists in the lover's (poet's), heart though each member of the corrupt world is also that lover. I love this poem, and I salute the fiftieth anniversary of the translation's publication, remembering when Lewis was working on it in '71, deeply bemused by the fact of the undertaking. So he changed 'métamorphoses' to 'changes,' because we all spoke of our 'changes,' the 'change' in our pockets, 'all my changes' (Neil Young). And sometimes I know the translator's simply talking about himself. Is the poet doing that too? Is the reader?"--Alice Notley 
Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Night of Loveless Nights

DESNOS, Robert

Poet Claire DeVoogd's first book explores what happens to speech, history, and the future when approached from an imagined position after ending--after after--charting a path from an unreal "before" to modernity. 
"Claire DeVoogd has a capacious mind. Her poetry has the commotion of history's frantic details and grand movements, and a metaphysical silence that is post-apocalyptic. VIA is a road for visionary readers."--Robert Glück" 
"A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, VIA represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd's poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the 'undertow and marvel' of language and history. 'Words extend around worlds' and we go on."--Susan Howe 
"There's a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd's poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between 'a cathedral of every pink' and 'a moss so green it bleeds real blood' she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams."--Lisa Jarnot 
"Near the end of VIA, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I'd been struck by lightning. Actually, I'd already been struck by lightning a million times while reading VIA, and DeVoogd's worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. VIA is the closest experience I've ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire's addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much."--Anselm Berrigan 
Poetry.

DeVoogd, Claire

Monica McClure's second poetry collection excavates inheritances--historical, cultural, familial, and economic--as it alternates between magnified and microscopic views of American life. 
Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as "the poster-girl for a new generation of poets," McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. THE GONE THING upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different landscapes: barren political realms, the author's own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn't die. 
"The border is the terrain of Monica McClure's poems, her world a flammable one made of money, work, worth. Her hypnotic stanzas burn with the kind of superheated attention that intensifies sight itself. With the prophetic intimacy and perfect aim of Alice Notley and Chelsey Minnis, McClure's hallucinatory poems press against reality not a mirror but a lit cigarette--as if to see what the real will reveal about itself, now that it's on fire. What can heat teach us. How much hotter can it get."--Joyelle McSweeney 
"Monica McClure's close-to-the-bone collection of remembrance and reverie takes you on a skin-scented slow dance through what Keats called the Mansion of Many Apartments, this time with Lana Del Rey's 'National Anthem' spinning softly in the background. So skillfully does McClure dissect the cruel poetics of beauty, loss, love, and the sharp inflection points of class, race, and gender that, to put it quite plainly, this book will slay you in your sleep."--Kim Rosenfield 
"Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should be: fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry."--Ethan Stebbins 
"In Monica McClure's extraordinary new book, transformations abound: memories are disinterred into the present as dreamlike miniatures of variously-classed American life, at times mordant, at times severe. Any one thing seems always to be in the process of becoming another. The figures in McClure's poems are not just blurred, they're running. The poems narrate escape, tenuous and vibrating -- escape from home, from acute desperation, from a bleak and threatening past that feels increasingly like a future. The 'gone thing' is what is missing and therefore ever-present, the hole burned into one's life by a torch of comprehensive predacity. That you have maybe crawled out of that hole does not delete it; it just leaves you staring back in fearful relief, waiting to slip."--Josef Kaplan 
Poetry. Family & Relationships. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.

The Gone Thing

McClure, Monica

In his second book of poems, Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. This collection blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence. 
The poems of BORDER WISDOM break and mourn physical borders at the same time. Here the exilic idea of a return to a home is expressed in the daily return to the blank page in search of a poem. In these returns the body brushes against the past and, as Hart Crane puts it, taps into "that memory all things nurse." 
"In BORDER WISDOM, Ahmad Almallah takes the notable step of writing in a mix of Arabic and English scripts, a bilingual poetics that has surfaced intermittently among the finest of our experimental writers. For this and for his exemplary writings in standalone English, I would extend to him the well-known welcome that Emerson directed to Whitman nearly two centuries ago: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.'"--Jerome Rothenberg 
"BORDER WISDOM reassembles the loss of a mother, mother tongue, and motherland, and gives pain a passage. The Arabic and English become 'windows [that] know something of the hidden world.' These poems are infinite and steadily moving in memory of all that's gone, and all that will be regained. A piercing collection."--Nathalie Handal 
"Ahmad Almallah observes the dust that rises when war and grief collide in the rubble of brief existences made briefer by geopolitical devastations. These poems honor the daily trembling and unexpected questions that accompany the losses of one's spaces of origin--one's mother, one's land, one's language. I won't lie and say that it is easy to read this unflinching work, these searing confrontations with the lividity and ferocity of grief. But I admire a poet who is unafraid to rise up and be a pallbearer, who is unafraid to point out the difficulty of holding in our memory what we would rather hold in our arms."--Divya Victor 
"Reading this book, one comes to understand that one of the most astounding, paradoxical companions to our grief is precision."--Polina Barskova 
"Almallah offers us a dazzling contemplation on the mother tongue and on transposing that tongue, so naturally, into a second language, making the Arabic of the unconscious glaringly visible on the page, subversively complementing the prevalent English of this poetic Möbius strip."--Antón Shammás 
"Almallah's writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice."--Naomi Shihab Nye 
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.

Border Wisdom

Almallah, Ahmad

Austrian poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker's essays, collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his investigation into the memory of the Holocaust. A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria's largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory. Bäcker's writings constitute a singular source for considering the critical potential of contemporary literature. || "The formal contribution of Heimrad Bäcker's documentary poetry is as original as Thomas Bernhard's unbreakable paragraphs, and as a moral contribution it remains incomparable." --JOSHUA COHEN || "Heimrad Bäcker produced some of the most enigmatic texts of conceptual writing by amplifying the dynamics between the concrete and the abstract, the ephemeral and the remnant, the decontextualized and the historicizeable, what cannot be depicted and what cannot be avoided." --CRAIG DWORKIN || "Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker's appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice-which is all of us." --JOHANNA DRUCKER || "Backer painstakingly-and repeatedly-samples, fragments, slashes, echoes, and reconstellates short piercing details from Nazi documents: metonymy as elegy and epitaph." --CHARLES BERNSTEIN || "Bäcker's reflections could not be timelier today when the fragility of memory confronts us with a bitter crossroads." --CARLOS SOTO ROMAN || Translation. Holocaust Studies. Essay. Poetics.

Documentary Poetry

Reference

Heimrad Bäcker

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Robert Fitterman's sixteenth and most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams's postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape. Mirroring Paterson's structure page-for-page, Fitterman translates Williams's patchwork of local news stories, personal letters, and found historical documents into the landscapes and mythologies of his hometown, revisiting many of the horrific events of St. Louis and its environs on the way-the East St. Louis massacre, the demolition of social housing projects, military chemical testing in the inner city during the Cold War, and more. Through a weave of verse, archival documents, and found language, Creve Coeur entangles suburban sprawl with the racial violence at the root of American urbanization. || "One of our generation's greatest poets returns to his Objectivist roots (sort of) in this unforgettable book which cracks one's heart right through. William Carlos Williams would have loved it." --SIANNE NGAI || "A latter-day Paterson in form, an innovative hybrid essay-poem in style, Creve Coeur strides into the heart of suburban-and urban-St. Louis as few have, power walking through familial stories, specific and broader regional histories, personal archives and anecdotes, factlets, trivia, and anonymous missives to understand what this 'broken heart' of America might reveal about itself and the US. Gathering in voices that show the Mound City's and its suburbs' racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies and the specificities and banalities of social dispersal, Fitterman finds truths as prepossessing as St. Louisans' beloved Provel cheese and as haunting as the ghostly voices from the Creve Coeur Falls." --JOHN KEENE || "In Rob Fitterman's sprawling tribute to both his hometown outside St. Louis and William Calos Williams's epic, Paterson, myth and history blur into one another-hardened by fact, stubborn in truth. Pitting urban planning against suburban development, Fitterman dredges up the buried bodies of the long forgotten and misbegotten, from the ordinary racism and class exclusions that shaped his suburban upbringing to the multiple origin stories of the 'broken-hearted lake' at the center of this poem." --TYRONE WILLIAMS

Creve Coeur

Robert Fitterman

Poet Karla Kelsey's lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) invents a new form for engaging a life. Known for the poetry she published in avant-garde magazines, Loy also wrote novels, stories, plays, and genre-bending philosophy, while painting, creating assemblages out of trash, and designing lamps for her Paris boutique. Though Loy was at the center of several modernist milieus-her friends and fans included Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brâncu¿i, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein-nearly all of her visual art has been lost and much of her writing has only been published posthumously or remains in manuscript. Reminiscent of the poetic-biographical strategies of such works as Nathalie Léger's Suite for Barbara Loden, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, and Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Karla Kelsey's novel of Loy's life creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented. Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology. || "In dazzling, devious prose, Karla Kelsey has written a brilliant novel from inside and outside Mina Loy -- a novel that is also a poem, a dictionary, a historical compendium, an elegant archival encounter. A book I will return to again and again." ­--DANIELLE DUTTON || "... a feminist critique of the systems of valuation through which much of Loy's art disappears. Through its imbrications of life-story, art object, temporality, and site-including the archival site in which the living poet-novelist labors-lyric imagination and critical art practice meet in a magisterial testimony of affinity, grieving, and connection to what remains and what furthers." --CARLA HARRYMAN || "Part chronicle of Loy's life, part scholarly diary, it explores how the experience of being immersed in Loy's archive un-leashes an experience of becoming, shaped by the desire to reach for the tantalizing past of the modernist era." -- YASNA BOZHKOVA || "...a gorgeous experience of intimacy, introducing us to an 'azure, blue glass gem, enamel' Mina Loy the way she had often thought of herself: 'a form of glass. Refractory, illuminated by the sun.'" --POUPEH MISSAGHI

Transcendental Factory

Karla Kelsey

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