Bücher veröffentlicht von Operating System

SUSURROS A MI PADRE represents Erick Sáenz''s efforts to connect language and culture, family and loss. The book charts the author''s fractured relationship with his father: a man whose Mexican blood he inherited. Sáenz collages memories, first-hand accounts, and interviews related to his Latinx identity in an effort to resurrect the culture that alludes him. From Los Angeles to San Jose, this is his journey to redefine himself."Susurros como vientos del Mar: Sáenz''s SUSURROS A MI PADRE, is a glowing debut. These poems shine with a quartzite clarity that guides the reader through vital fronteras of Latinx experience. Weaving together a polyvocal lyric of familial inquiry, Sáenz''s poetry is a refreshing, reinvigorating looking at a Latinx narrative that so many live, and yet so few ever read about. May this Poet''s ocean of language change that tide."-Angel Dominguez"Let this book show you an interrogation and migration of story, where story is made of secrets: from Monterrey to Los Angeles to San José and back; through wanting to know one''s father, and ultimately, oneself. In this candid, real-time narrative, Erick Sáenz sits with the discomfort and mystery of words in Spanish and English that [pass time], where time is a summation of moments, questions, memories; and where passing is actively standing watch at a life that''s yours. Call it disenfranchised grief-or listen when he asks, ''What is it like growing up landlocked?''-or when he affects, ''Este es mi elogia, papi'' with the crushing beauty of a confession. Sáenz writes fatherlessness, restlessness, and distance and othering as double consciousness. This story is a slow, heartfelt corrido unveiling the poetics of loss."-Janice Sapigao"At birth, the left hemisphere of our brains registers the difference between speech and noise. Even before an infant begins to babble, the brain has built a map for language. We know this because of brain-imaging, which, in some cases, illuminates the firing of synapses by placing them on a topographic plane. When reading Sáenz''s text, my experience is akin to being on this plane, where the electrical eruptions are both beautiful and violent, but invited and significant. I experience linguistic ruptures. And while I am asked to return to past memories, to photographs, voices recollected, all the while negotiating a narrative that won''t be easily pieced back together, I see the importance of a text such as this as an utterance I both need and recognize. Needless to say, this text is incredible."-Lisa Donovan-Catharsis and Cultural Memory: an OS conversation with Erick Sáenz, author of ''Susurros a Mi Padre''

"BORN AGAIN is an ecstatic disquisition on the psychic, sensual and cerebral power of religious experience. In a crucible of direct encounter with the Holy Spirit, towering and oppressive mental structures are deranged and reshaped into a dynamic feminist recourse of audacious openings: borderless, raw and alive. Instead of shaming the male god figurehead these lyrics twist in vertiginous funnels disarming power empathically, a rebellious performance that proliferates like quicksilver in a revelatory field of creative fire. Libidinal improvisatory anti-edict, anti-threshold terrestrial tangibility. Expressing volatile, febrile and point blank composure Ivy Johnson redefines (fathoms) what it means to be enthralled as she unburdens the epic weight of judgment and spiritual peril in a veil of viscose corporeality. The erotics of immanence are emancipatory and miraculous here, now."--Brenda Iijima"BORN AGAIN is a book about the redemptive power of the singular voice, arising from the mixture of a multitude of voices, coming together as a single flame to light the way through a landscape of sorrow, evil, extreme beauty, and extreme feeling. The book teeters between definitions of poetry and the essay form to come upon the right way to say the unsayable, telling us things like: ''I am nothing like a tree / You think I''m in a drought / You think I''m shriveling up / You are wrong.'' Ivy Johnson is a poet who believes that the I and the spirit are intertwined forever in the act of the poem. She gives the poets of today and tomorrow the permission to gain strength from the force of the persona, with its ability to surround trauma and alchemize it into the sort of language that sustains. Johnson tells us: ''I am free I am free / Believe me I am.'' And we do believe she is free. And we believe, in her poems, we are, too."--Dorothea Lasky"Are you ''more Medea than Oedipus''? Are you Jesus? Have you arrived to Ivy Johnson''s poetry to experience the revisitation of rape or an abstract ''ecological armageddon'' of language or the orifice of a poetic body? Here, we become her wakeful marigolds. We sit across from her like pages of membranes, trying to eat as fast as we can off the hypnotic fluency of her literary fingers, twisting and turning with her as we unlock the ''locomotion of a tautology,'' the constant lips and thighs and gurgles or shareholders of her text. And we don''t die happily."--Vi Khi Nao------"Slipperiness and Simultaneous Revolt": an OS conversation with Ivy Johnson, author of ''Born Again''

Daughter Isotope is a book of "hybrid" poems that speaks to multiple iterations of "daughter" tropes across generations, national borders, and timescales. Central to the question of the Daughter Isotope is: What is a collective archive? within a global, disparate, migrant cultural space. DI is organized in a series of four "clouds," calling up the vague, penetrable borders of our digital lives, both searching and searchable.Throughout the manuscript, the poems operate as types of search engines that test the boundaries of often overlapping archives or "clouds" that make up diasporic experience. Starting with a series of poems based on the Mahabharata, an "encyclopedic" Sanskrit epic-cloud about an apocalyptic war composed over centuries, the organization of the manuscript is based off of South Asian polyvocal storytelling traditions. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg, a "daughter" gender could be seen as any "child" or subject under a rigid paternal order - whether Hindu nationalism or U.S. exceptionalism - whose filiation is in question. Dispersed through the manuscript are multiple versions/clouds of Draupadi, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Krishna, Michael Jackson, and the aspirational figure of @agirl, among others uncertain "daughters." Poems interrogate the stability of various "daughter" genders through myth, online personas, computer gaming, nuclear physics, and artificial intelligence.

As part of the Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts series, The OS presents FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, a revised and expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg''s variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition the book has been redesigned and expanded, featuring an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen''s writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate. "The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the ''human / other-than-human worlds'' originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice!"-Cecilia Vicu├▒a

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as John McPhee, Rachel Carson, Timothy Morton, Frank White, and others, LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD explores philosophies of nature old and new through poetry and science fiction. The anthropocene crisis and the crisis of humanity-as-invasive-species are framed in this text as global, as well as personal, misadventures. A mixed-genre work, readers encounter poems and stories-islands and continents-in a rapid succession of speculative geography, and readers are invited to join its beleaguered, psychozoic populations."Peter Milne Greiner''s poems range widely across space, time, and cultural history-from the Magna Carta to The Little Mermaid, from the pyramids to the astronomical observatory at Mauna Kea-and catch up in their full-throttle trajectory a universe of detail about the nature of things. Indeed, the poet''s brooding over the fate of Geena Davis as well as that of ''lame dystopias'' suggests nothing so much as Lucretius''s epic enterprise: ''I mine human doing, '' Greiner declares, ''for all its garish hyper objects.'' By deploying a language alert to figurative provocation that''s sharpened by a tautly disjunctive syntax, Greiner uncovers the apocalypse in the quotidian and raises everyday life to fearsome implication." -Albert Mobilio"LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD is in the world, but it''s not of it. Peter Milne Greiner is the voice of the cosmic mundane-sublime, real, and existentially funny." -Claire L. Evans-Hopping the Imaginary''s Obscure Islands :: An OS [re:con]versation with Peter Milne Greiner

2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Finalist. JP Howard''s debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940''s and 1950''s) with snapshots from the poet''s own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother''s modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a "model" mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother''s overlapping lives unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970''s and 80''s: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter''s eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein."JP Howard''s collection of poems is a raw reminder of the experience of motherhood and daughterhood. Her sharp memories of love and neglect; elegance, admiration and inadequacy leave a salty/sweet taste not soon forgotten." Jewelle Gomez"Juliet P. Howard''s porcelain collection of daughter memoirs is enough to break into you like fine China the shadow of her legacy hovering just above diva, the tenderness of grief stained just below doll." Anastacia Tolbert"Praise Juliet Howard for the wonderful ability to bring to life a mother whose beauty, seduction and danger challenge the notions of a young girl growing up in her shadow. SAY/MIRROR manages to capture with sharp detail and lively resonant language the elegance and ambivalence of the poet''s mother and her world. These poems evoke images of passion and loss, pain and joy. We must all stand up and applaud the poem ''pushing her way to the surface... her shape on the page as she unfolds.''" Pamela L. Laskin"JP Howard stands out both for her fine poetry and for her passionate, unrelenting involvement with and on behalf of lesbians of color, all lesbians, and the LGBTQ literary community. She reverently celebrates our forebears. A poet, a teacher, and a curator, Ms. Howard has shown an ongoing commitment to nurturing our writers and to writing and publishing from her heart." Lambda Literary Award judges Reginald Harris and Lee Lynch"-to mourn, to protest, to wish for peace and to fight for justiceΓÇè-ΓÇèan OS [re:con]versation with JP Howard

Danielle Pafunda’s Spite reimagines André Breton’s Nadja in conversation with his Communicating Vessels and My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed. Spite speaks through the melancholy bohemian dream girl. No longer gateway to the masculine artist’s destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems consider what happens when we no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site. Nadja rolls her ex-lover on a gurney through a city on fire. She trawls construction sites, nurses’ brows, and apple trees. We pick up the tin-can extension, wreck ourselves on the delirious island, consider the dishonest belief that every day must include / pain, and descend a massive swath of silk. Spite has no fear of ugly feelings, nor of wonder.Excerpts appear at:Diode PoetryTypo Magazine

From the author, Nik De Dominic: "My pulmonologist once told me that the medical community would always have an interest in me because I was an uncommon presentation of a rare illness. Recently, I admitted myself to Los Angeles County Hospital’s emergency room because of shortness of breath. In the past, I would’ve driven home, slept it off, but I’d had open heart surgery about 2 and a half months prior. That day my baseline was blown, I was having difficulty finishing sentences, and couldn’t complete activities of minimal exertion that a week prior I could’ve ran circles around (see what I did there). Because of a fear of heart attack I was almost immediately given a bay, around 50 minutes after initially standing in queue to check myself in. The sheets hadn’t been changed and there was a large blood stain where the previous patient had labs drawn. Blood, also, on the rails of the bed and some of the terminals. A man who I imagine was admitted against his will kept leaving his bay, accosting the ER doctor, referring to her as nurse, demanding back his knife - his property - which was taken from him upon his arrival. Every five minutes or so I’d see his shuffling silhouette behind my curtain, him calling nurse, nurse. Another patient howled in pain as his charge argued with him for his compliance. Rate your pain between 1-10. 9 because a 10 I’d be dead, he said. The behavior is most likely narcotic seeking, someone else. As I struggled to breathe, Janna wept and caressed my forehead. These horrors, all, though, backdrop. Both employee and patient become accustomed to these spaces because of the sheer amount of time spent there and despite their initial terror, these spaces become everyday. They have to. Overheard: my charge nurse cancelling her Verizon International Wireless Plan because she hasn’t used it since her trip to Dubai; the patient in the bay across urging his cousin to leave his girlfriend because she lies, she is lying. Not sure about what, but something. And one doctor informing another that a sale at Joann Fabrics is about to end and though she glossed it and didn’t see anything good her colleague should still check it out. Ok, those, like death, are all endings, but you get what I’m saying. These banal moments the most common and only punctuated by code blues and other emergency, despite whatever an NBC drama sells us. Goodbye Wolf attempts to explore these spaces, the interstices of everyday and, frankly, incredibly scary shit. Chronic disease through the lens of backpage horoscope. Organ failure through vegan donuts. The anxiety of not being able to breath through tropes of fairy tale and the fantastical. Suicide and issues of mental health as postage stamps. The same pulmonologist told me lung disease sounds a lot scarier than it is, and he was right. As my wife and I waited for chest x-ray and EKG to ultimately be cleared without needing critical intervention, we made shitty jokes on a text thread with our five closest friends, a text thread that mostly consists of what new restaurant one of us had gone to, the ages of late night hosts, and more generally our television consumption patterns. That day, news of a child born and the baby’s picture. A true and beautiful rarity. Her birth and that new show with what’s-his-name surely more important than what any test would find. We had to believe that, know that, or how else would we have survived?"  

In The grass is greener when the sun is yellow, poets Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte engage with the work of dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Through research into these innovative women's dances, ideas, and lives, Rosenthal and Witte use language from and about the choreographers to create a series of co-written sonnets that are interwoven with letters between the two poets. These letters describe the process of composing the poems and branch into discussions of dance, poetics, gender, transgression, the unfolding disaster of the current political scene, and much else, in the associative weave that epistolary form enacts. Together, the poems and letters construct an environment of reflection, intimacy, and vulnerability, one that is both challenging and invitational.

"Filip Marinovich is one of my favorite living poets! He has lived his poems for many years now and we can trust he means it when he says, 'the tree's boyfriend is me / trim the pubes / and get ready for the muse.' Dendrophiliacs have a new champion, a poet as werewolf as they come, as beautiful as you can imagine! You love great poems and need this book! "¿ -- CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for DeathFilip Marinovich, author of The Suitcase Tree, writes: "I started writing a book based on a failed trip to Belgrade where I was supposed to stay for a month but only could stay four days due to breakdown insomnia grief mind voices. Went back to New York and listened to the book stop start. Then my uncle died. In the book we had the conversation I couldn't have with him in Belgrade."

The George Oppen Memorial BBQ could be considered a ritual, an invocation, a celebration, a protest. Its characters and landscape are an amorphous, chimeric Promised Land where retributions are real, demagogues are punished, and freedom is a call for both daiquiris and rumination. It is a network against austerity and homogeneity. It is a commune with enough space for the deepest of privacies. It is a place to destabilize the Western canon, to make cracks about Schopenhauer, to exile white messiahs, to mourn Fred Hampton, and Fela Kuti, and Federico Garcia Lorca. It is a brief rupture in time and space where possibilities are freed of their enclosures, where unrest is realized and invigorated. It is the moment when all the lights go out, right before the riot starts.

"Yo zillion pilgrims, Lori Anderson Moseman's 'Y' will transmogrify your hopeless chromosome. Text as performance installation, activist play practice, and you could be anyone in the colony working against collapse. There are daily exercises. Say what: be the insides of a peace sign seen from space, weep to believe in democracy, do what you can in the meanwhile. Keep keeping on - is Y, oh Y - words to live by." - Mk (aka Matthew Klane)"Lori Anderson Moseman's meditation 'Y' leads us from the hula-hooping body shaking off its rusts, to an enervated America that ominously looks to Cold War solutions while waters rise. Shimmy AND shimmer. As 'Y' crumbles, so does democracy. Maybe. Gender as Mobius Strip, the body rusts from the inside out, bones threaten to topple (like Frida's in her painting The Broken Column"), but the cure resides in spirals, circles. The book turns in on itself, gathering along the way, gender in it's swiveling baskets. 'Y' makes me rethink Orion in the sky, joy in the rhythmic tap of hula-hoop against rust belt. You will find your hips in this book: circuit, enclosure, zodiac, wreath, crown. '....a single body is not enough.'"- Anne Gorrick"Lori Anderson Moseman never ceases. To invent, then reinvent. To build, then knock down. To astonish with her slight of hand, then casually point out the somatic trick. In true form, her Y does, and then does some more. If 'obstruction is the body itself,' then 'Y' is our passageway. To what end, I don't know. And I rather like it that way. So long as Anderson Moseman is ushering us through, and through, and through. We know we will get there. Mother Courage says so, and she's armed with a hula hoop." - Brandi Katherine Herrera Much like you, Y is a catalyst¿-¿an indeterminate variable active in cultural production. A collective organism in the waste stream, Y bemoans their leaching marrow, tries strengthening their aging spine with a hula hoop. In grocery stores, in art galleries, at dentist offices and fuel transfer stations, Y hoops to lament, invent and foment. Y's looping traces analogy-n-ratio as if relation were the life-blood linking bodies to orbits. Y wants to impeach. Jaw gyrates. Hips open. Round and round, Y circumscribes the body politic in a kind of agitprop theatre that protests POTUS, pipelines, and spies. Trying to energize and not terrorize, Y gathers beloveds to fight for food justice, for safe environs. As a printed matter, the book Y is the textual residue of labor and play. A curious body holds, twists, then bounces a prop. Y calls these "poems" or "stories" a "somatic trick." In sum, Y's sonic practice is an interspecies interaction created to cope with the year 2017¿-¿its corpses and bar codes. Y is a little free speech corral.

'From Being Things, To Equalities In All' is a sequence of 24 couplets (1 per page), the construction of which has been guided by syntactical, semantic and graphical constraint. The results are semi-concrete and utterly political - a language capable of acknowledging the degree to which it is both private refuge and public domain, and a language aware of its situation vis-a-vis history's horizon.

"In The Book of Everyday Instruction-which presents a body of work developed between 2015 and 2018, split into eight chapters-Bass radicalizes the language through which we experience, navigate, and discuss intimacy. She surrenders the role of author in this evolving narrative, and instead approaches each chapter with an eagerness to let the story write itself. Bass imagines a series of interpersonal interactions wherein she shares creative license with her collaborators, an eclectic group of strangers she finds on the internet, through research, and within her diverse creative communities of practice." - Nico Wheadon, The Brooklyn Rail "Instead of setting the stage for familiarity and comfort as politeness most often does, Bass' announces the space in which she lets us know what she will and will not do for us. It is a smile that says, "No."; It is the space in which she articulates her refusal to take control, to tell you what to think, to look for you, to, in a certain dramatically put sense, be "The Artist"; Which is not at all to say there is nothing to say, nothing to read or see - what there is is vast and infinitely specific and imbued with a rare intelligence and sentiment. But the only way you can see it is to take responsibility for your own seeing. To take responsibility for yourself as another singularity, a specific singularity bringing with it all the historical baggage that is positionality. Bass invites us to play a different game, one in which neither the rules nor we are familiar." - Bill Dietz, "Politesse against the social" In 2015, conceptual artist Chloë Bass began a two-year chronicle of one-on-one social interactions, beginning with the question "How do we know when we're really together?" Through private performances, interactive experiences, text installations, interviews and photography, Bass explored the pair relationship, expanding ideas of place, history, activity, and distance. In developing the project, Bass conceptualized the book as an exhibit; now, in collaboration with The Operating System, she presents an exhibit as a book.

How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of “what one knows” have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others?These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we’ve learned—each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu—this anthology project was born. In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish—that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit. Instead, let there be a steady effort to compile lore and take inventory of strategies, intersections, bridges; to map our histories, to sight possibilities for the future. We are honored and thankful to have the words of the following poets in this anthology: Mai Der Vang (Foreword), Ching-In Chen, Addie Tsai, Tony Robles, Wendy Gaudin, Ernesto L. Abeytia, Abigail Licad, Tim Seibles, Melissa Coss Aquino, Sasha Pimentel, Jose Angel Araguz, Khadijah Queen, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, and Kenji Liu.

'The Book of Sounds,' released as a dual language edition as part of The Operating System's "Glossarium :: Unsilenced Texts" series, is Mehdi Navid's first novelette, translated from the Farsi by Tina Rahimi. The book was not publishable in Iran. The Book of Sounds is an honest exploration of the socio-political context of contemporary Iran, the challenges, hopes and dreams of actual people living in this context, much like the book's characters, among the pages of an episode- a space whose "door" is to be eventually "turned over as a page." Through Navid's inventive poetic prose, sounds evolve into the main filter through which the narration takes place. Throughout the book, the reader will notice an unconventional use of syntax, and a fresh approach to auditory imagery, which is uniquely married to the common logic of everyday words.

"Gregory Crosby's poetry matches an extensive knowledge of literary form with a curator's eye for the idiosyncrasies of our popular culture. He zooms in on familiar scenes of contemporary life - 'Lonely Starbucks Lovers,' 'Netflix & Chill.' He writes elegant elegies for David Bowie and Adam West. Here is a poet who is able to compose in the midst of chaos, refusing to resort to the easy narratives that make sense of it all. This allows his work to embrace a democratic range of experiences from the political to the banal. Crosby can't help being engaged, often satiric, but always sincere; he wonders, 'How to say something to see something. / How to give voice to despair without/ giving in to despair.' Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion is a poetic survival manual - a guide for navigating a maze of contradictions. It's a must read!" - Elaine EquiWalking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion is just that-the thoughts that arise as you turn your back on whatever catastrophe of air and light is blossoming in your wake and press forward as best you can, the roar in your ears turning somehow into poetry. Among the shrapnel: time, mortality, culture, dead twins, funeral strippers, lonely Starbucks lovers, apocalyptic elections, ennui, extended plays, injustice, aubades, Pluto, sex, loneliness, Bowie, Batman, strange dreams, reading comics by flashlight, democracy in ruins, racism, hope, melancholy, masks, pierced tongues, lost souls, scarecrows, violence, love, American twilights & resistance, resistance, (nevertheless) resistance. Also a dog, barking in the distance.

"Attendance is a meditation, an ushering-in of the kind of mindfulness that life deserves. One that leaves readers like me nodding and saying yes to lines like these: 'Just try to want different things' and 'You can do anything you want with me as long as you do it slowly first.' Carlos and Kaminer are power, and this book is plain gorgeous." --Natashia Deón, author of Grace "I expected to be moved by this collaborative work from Rachel McLeod Kaminer and Rocío Carlos-they are two distinct and beautiful poets after all. But what I didn't expect from Attendance is the way it brought the life around me to life. How the birds and the trees and the landscape began to move in ways I hadn't noticed before, how my skin began to feel enveloped by the details of the day. Great art has always made me know that I belonged in the world, that I wasn't wandering through it alone. And Attendance, as much as any recent book, has reminded me of this truth." --Chiwan Choi, author of The Yellow House "what can we actually unlearn? capitalism is cellular where birdsound is molecular? shall we abandon the impulse to overtake? shall we slough of layers of administration to expose the medular hollow? where might we rest our heads?" --jen hofer, from 'an after attendance'---------------------Reading Attendance trains your attention on plants and animals until you can't stop noticing them. It's a way of moving through the natural world-which turns out to include the whole world. An almanac, a logbook, a devotional, a witness statement, poetry. A documentary not in the sense of capturing but in the sense of being a creature paying attention to the world we already live in. It's a hybrid text: One year of two people reaching their arms across styles and genres. At times notes, at times lists, or run-on sentences, or poems, or things that want to be poems, but always plants, and always animals. The words are offered up with no correction or with the revision exposed. This is writing that includes where it comes from or writing that painfully doesn't become.We hold so many questions about love and attention and violence.

"So often our urgencies upend themselves into absurdities. Lyric turns to joke and then to pugnacious elegy. So in Flatt's and Mund's Chlorosis, a dying world becomes a dynamic collaboration. Given options that find us 'imping toward stasis,' this poetry reanimates and throws color and light on a dimming horizon. Can poetry save us? Maybe not. But perhaps what we need now is sustenance, not salvation. Both slapstick and delicate, Chlorosis sustains the witness necessary to this moment. Now, in this 'fugitive dimension,' we are borne on 'an absent violence,' 'still and waking for that which we lack / from which to emerge.'"-Elizabeth Robinson"In these poems, Michael Flatt and Derrick Mund flicker between digital screens and imperceptibly crumbling landscapes to create a series of nameless glances cast at a contemporary psychic abyss. Here, Chlorosis reads like a thread of linked pastorals-eulogizing the living room of a broken American heart-choked by sunlit swarms of dust motes and a soft, semi-urban dread."-Janaka Stucky"Chlorosis is a moving experiment in the uses of the poetic 'we' in a time of crisis. It hangs tight-it usually means just two people. The component members of that 'we' write to each other, as each other, and for each other. And as they survey together a world in which there is no respite from the oncoming disaster, that 'we' becomes a tiny, nimble pivot for unexpected clarities and also for the testing out of tentative rhythms-both of which we'll all be needing, from here on out."-Christopher NealonWith Chlorosis-a leaf disease in plant life caused by lack of light, literally translated as "green sickness"-Flatt and Mund explore the difficulties of finding and sustaining love in the midst of the various toxicities of the anthropocene: slow violence, environmental catastrophe, economic malaise, polluted cultural memory, digital abjection, etc. Alternating between lyrical address and objectivist observation, this collection of untitled poems also engages with voices from the fields of ecopoetics and new materialism. In this collaboration, the first-person pronouns break down actively, alertly, and unevenly, alongside generalized collapse. Love, however-humanist love, romantic love, brotherly love-is never far from view.

"In a story of William Carlos Williams as a child, told by his mother, the poet puts the wrong shoes on the wrong feet by accident and upon realizing it, leaves them on for a while thinking about how weird it feels. Anne Gorrick does something like that, but with the internet and gender fluidity, in this brilliantly bizarre new book of poems. Searching for anything other than correct answers, pursuing online flaneurie by translation of source texts, the explosive humor here of interruptions, half-remembered allusions, and shifts in diction invents a gonzo musical logic, a texture which stops off at Jackson Mac Low, at Leslie Scalapino's splintered phenomenology, and at a NY school idiom of being surprised by your own writing, before continuing on with its own glorious road movie. "Kiss the snot otter in a hard hat / and then tell a story about your stuff" "Is Percocet on the periodic table?" "Herpes travels to a science center as Brineshrimpdirect" "Plenty of fish, please touch, pleaser shoes" "She is pro-life curious"" - Trace Peterson"'An Absence' is the news told in "Starfish Slang" and delivered to the house of poetry. You think this book of poems should land on the front lawn, but instead it crashes through the living room window and shatters predictability. It startles you, but no one gets hurt, you are only more aware of the world around you. And healed by the inventory. Anne Gorrick confounds and clarifies through a determined weaving, that is both familiar and strange. The poetry seems to be an accident, but you know it is full of care, and you can't help but rubberneck as the scenes that are revealed line by line become increasingly absurd and revelatory. It is a time capsule and core sample, compiled from fragments of beauty and danger. There is no turning back." -Michael Rothenbergfrom the author:"These poems began in 2011 with an investigation into John Cage's adventures with chance. I was working at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and we had a small museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, with a regular exhibition called Reading Objects. The idea of the show is to explore and expand on what is traditionally said on those little cards next to paintings. So we were presented with an array of visual work, and could pick pieces to write about. I decided to write something to accompany a musical score by Cage that was to be part of exhibition. I wrote something, and I came to hate it. This poem was displayed next to Cage's score. I felt I didn't nearly go far enough with the poem to really engage with Cage. So I started again by researching Cage, and I also spent time with Jackson Mac Low's 'Representative Works.' "Around this time, I began to really notice and found myself entertained by the way search engines attempt to anticipate our needs. I began to slowly type lines of poetry (eventually working my way toward entire short poems) into the Google and Bing search boxes, and laugh my way through the list of wrongly anticipated results that appeared underneath my search. I began to make poems out of these (wrong) search results. At first, I thought I was adding chance into the poem, but I came to realize it was just the opposite: these search results came from the zeitgeist's algorithmic desire, not my own, which ended up expanding the possibilities for the poem. The poetic "I" dissolves in this desire." - Anne Gorrick

"It turns out Wally Swist is a skilled essayist and reviewer as well as a celebrated poet and a decidedly eclectic reader. Singing for Nothing (the title alone says something about the condition of poetry) is a refined review of the work of both known and overlooked contemporary poets, as well as essays and reviews of the work of a range of artists, writers, and even scientists. The accounts are so intriguing, even for those unfamiliar with the subterranean world of poetry or obscure literature, after reading this book one would want to head off to the nearest library or bookstore and see what you've missed." - John Hanson Mitchell "Wally Swist's life has been steeped in poetry and guided by a steadfast belief in the power of literature. As book seller, a book creator, a poet, an essayist, a reviewer, and a generous supporter of other writers, he inhabits a world in which reading is indivisible from writing, and can't be untangled from life itself. So, it seems utterly fitting that Singing for Nothing maps that life by way of his essays and reviews. Through the assiduous shaping of his critical commentary on literature from around world and close to home, Swist has created a distinctive, thought-provoking memoir that is also a celebration of literature itself. " - Jane Brox Singing for Nothing was written over a period of 40 years. The essays, reviews, and other selected prose collected here constitute the author's poetic ruminations, his political and social thought, and his perennial philosophy over that time-to now. Much of the book was composed only recently in an attempt to push the traditional boundaries of nonfiction and memoir. Each of the eight chapters are introduced with anecdotal material from Swist's literary life, which albeit was impoverished financially, at times, but nearly always rich with his meetings with authors and his luminous reading through the years. Topics include reviews of the work of significant poets and writers; a chapter regarding haiku, an often misunderstood Japanese poetic form, and its intersection with Zen; a few academic essays regarding pop culture, the science of measurement, and the history of retirement in America; several blogs regarding psycho-spirituality; and a guided morning meditation using the chakras closes this book, which also includes some of this award-winning poet's poetry. The volume's subtitle, 'Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir', is apropos for what this book both embraces and what it explores by pressing the limits of traditional literary boundaries. Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); and Invocation (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in many publications, including Commonweal, North American Review, Rattle, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011 (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), and upstreet. A poem of Swist's was recently included on the national radio program The Writer's Almanac.

"Johnny Damm's Science of Things Familiar diagrams the ways we move toward and away from one another, exploring relationship through the failures and disjuncts that reveal it. In annotated illustrations taken out of their original context, in comics stripped of their narrative content, and in cinematic essays whose parts are sutured where they've been spliced, these pieces take apart the familiar to see what makes it tick. Troubling our assumptions about the workings of nonfiction, they reveal themselves as highly constructed, interweaving the personal and historical just as the book's "rat-a-tat" refrain rings out both drumbeat and gunfire. If we catch ourselves dancing, we've missed the point. Witty and serious, critical and compassionate, Damm invents a new visual poetics in which what we see and hear do not sync up. This is his way of waking us up with a "BLAM!" and "WHOOSH!" to the history of appropriation and conquest underlying America's popular forms. Nothing here is familiar, even as we recognize parts of the whole." - Amaranth Borsuk"Johnny Damm's 'Science of Things Familiar' mashes up Classics Illustrated, vintage diagrams, and film director bios to create an unlikely fusion that is a oblique yet often poignant autobiography as well as an essay on the way that we transform culture as much as it transforms us."- Matt Madden, author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style"'Science of Things Familiar' captures "freeze-frames" from the history of comic books, crime films, and blues music, all from the middle of the darkest century. Johnny Damm accents the pulpish poetics in both the visual poetry and the phonic milieu, experienced by the masses in each cheap genre made on the fly for everyone. " -Christian BökHerman Melville performing jumping jacks. An experimental Brazilian filmmaker making British propaganda films. A legendary delta bluesman who prefers to play the pop hits of the day. In Science of Things Familiar, Johnny Damm sifts through cultural detritus to disturb the sleeping past.In an uncategorizable mix of image and text, Science of Things Familiar scavenges from 50's pulp comics, 19th century scientific diagrams, film noir shooting scripts, and more. Damm introduces the reader to an American landscape of bastard blendings, where the familiar swiftly gives way to the uncanny.

"Richard Lucyshyn sees and hears what others sometimes miss or are not in the mood to receive; his poems change all that; they invite us into a world of astonishing unity and regard, into states and ideas, visions and mysteries, into abundantly and carefully layered regions within that world; we're invited to understand, marvel, and come away with newly minted, newly awakened brain waves; Lucyshyn's gift to us always leaves us grateful, glad and freshly activated" - Dara Wier, In the Still of the Night "Richard Lucyshyn's debut collection is a gorgeously tender, challenging psalm for the reckoners and seekers among us desperate to make sense of our dissonant and broken world, to be better than we are and have been, "to be again born, machined new" - it's an epic song for the strange unnamable that manages to invent, page after page, a staggering "new genus of ache." This collection is itself the machine that hopes, which is the machine we need more than ever right now. Ever incantatory, these poems are a choir, calling for and summoning grace at every turn." - Allison Titus, The True Book of Animal Homes "'I made for you a new machine…' immediately makes demands of you: 'say star and say sun // say halo frost and feather.' And it immediately tells you things about yourself you might not want to hear: 'Your penance is shabby…You will always hold dissonance and it will always be weird.' Lucyshyn earns this by being infinitely more self-critical: 'how many backs I tore / it was me what / 39 lashed / what held the whip / was me / what turned away.' Striking a seemingly impossible balance between what he calls 'a practiced stillness attended to" and the "ecstasy of text,' Lucyshyn creates a space both critical and celebratory, frenetic and meditative, contemporary and mythic. And only because he has the integrity to 'wager memories we dare to hold' are we left with 'the oily residue of hope.'" - Chris Tonelli, Whatever Stasis I made for you a new machine and all it does is hope concerns itself with the language of prayer and the action of prayer. Many of the poems, the [psalms] in particular, are the product of holding some word or phrase or sound in mind and mouth until it somehow exhales and reveals what word or phrase or sound it leads to. It's something more or less or not at all like dusting off some map that has always been exactly as it needed to be, that has never not existed.