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ASCENSION
giovanni singleton
Winner of the California Book Award

Winner of the 81st Annual California Book Award for Poetry In this diary of intentionality, the behearer and the beholder approach the world with an attitude of longing—for less: less sorrow, less suffering. Daily practice delivers the speaker to profound meditations on the nature of the self. These poems press against our deepest held questions: what is an I? Where are my borders? What or how am I “with”? “From whom—from what—do we hide?” giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, [...]

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HEATH COURSE PAK
Tan Lin

Like its predecessor, HEATH (plagiarism/outsource), Heath Course Pak exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samuel Pepys Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger’s death. Sad, appropriated, lyrical and confused, the book contains a brief history of recent performance art, a legal defense of plagiarism, the diary of a poetry workshop at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, an MP3 protest song, and an examination of SMS and GMS technologies as distribution networks for human sadness. [...]

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CONFESSIONS OF A PLAGIARIST
Kevin Kopelson

In college, Kevin Kopelson passed off a paper by his older brother Robert as his own. In graduate school, he plagiarized nearly an entire article from a respected scholar, and then later, having met her and been asked if he would send something for her to read, sent that essay he had plagiarized from her work. This is not to mention the many instances in which he quoted others extensively, not passing their work off as his own, but substituting [...]

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DECK OF DEEDS
Rodrigo Toscano

Deck of Deeds is comprised of seventy poetic prose image captions (without images) whose titles are inspired by the popular Latin American loteria card game. Written by a poet who logs in an average of ten thousand miles of air travel each month working as a union trainer and coordinator throughout the U.S., the “cards” reflect a dizzying array of cultural-geographic locations, each one acting as a scene-setter for highly dystopian portraits of “people” caught in a tangle of industry-specific [...]

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154 FORTIES
Jackson Mac Low

The first publication of the complete series of Jackson Mac Low’s “Forties” poems. Written and revised from 1990 to 2001 with a method Mac Low called “gathering,” where he took into the poems words, phrases, and other kinds of word strings, and sometimes sentences, that he saw, heard, or thought of while writing the drafts, the poems include detailed markings of caesural spacing, timing, compound words (many neologistic), and metrical stress. Each of the poems adhere to what Mac Low [...]

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[BOND, JAMES]
Michelle Disler

Invokes a narrative and intimate distance through the imbalance of power between men & detectives and women & wives, leaving a risky proposition like an alphabet or the simple complexity of memoir and writing about memory. A sobering examination of the ultimate spy-styled popular thriller, a nuanced deconstruction of model masculinity in mass culture. Michelle Disler is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Seneca Review, Lake Effect, Gulf [...]

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YINGELISHI
Jonathan Stalling

The nearly supernatural nature of this groundbreaking work can be glimpsed in the book’s title. When read aloud, Yíngelìshi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” while the Chinese reader sees the Chinese characters for “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Stalling coined this term (and “Sinophonic English”) to give a positive name to an increasingly widespread variation of English created by combining the two dominant languages of globalization (Mandarin Chinese and English). With over [...]

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STILL
Matthew Cooperman

“It’s as if,” writes Gillian Conoley of Still: Of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move, “in our still lives, in the still shots of cultural, historical and individual atomized memory, Matthew Cooperman is holding a Geiger counter, a microphone, a mixing bowl and a spatula, defying his own lines, ‘we cannot sing dragging our saddles after and befores.’ On a big canvas, both global and the glottal, all history and information aswirl, this book risks being courageous, [...]

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TIME’S WALLET
Steve Katz

Time’s Wallet is a memoir written in discrete pieces, “memoirrhoids.” The 137 short bits cover the variety and extent of a life from 1935 to the present, from Manhattan by various routes to Denver, Colorado. The work presents itself not as a narrative arc, but as memory itself occurs, in brief stories rising more or less at random in the mind. Each remembered narrative is allowed to resolve itself through its own form, and that variety creates a different overall texture. Each [...]

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VACANT LOT
Oliver Rohe

Set in a city much like Beirut in the aftermath of bloody civil war, a former mercenary relates his fate and that of others of his kind after the peace. The world is rapidly healing itself—people getting back to their lives, the city being rebuilt. But he is unable to leave the site his crimes. Rohe’s narrative is striking in its understatement: much of the work’s power lies in what’s unsaid, what’s hinted and inferred. Sentences run on and on [...]

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THE FIELD IS LETHAL
Suzanne Doppelt

The supernatural, ventriloquism, table-turning, magic carpets, ghosts, The Field is Lethal is immersed in a late nineteeth-century spiritualism . Borrowing freely from folklore and anecdote, Doppelt mixes oblique references, catching us in the sound and play of language as much as of ideas. Well-known as a photographer, Doppelt juxtaposes her text with delicate, eerie images. As Avital Ronell writes in her Postface for the book, we appreciate here “her manner, her astonishing modalities, the precision of her cuts.” Suzanne Doppelt, a [...]

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THE DESIRES OF LETTERS
Laynie Browne

“Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again” (Anne Waldman). Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a passionate commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the [...]

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THE USE OF SPEECH
Nathalie Sarraute

In this reprint of a classic later work from French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, one finds a “delectably austere, beady-eyed book. . . . The phrases that give rise to the scenes or episodes are ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a café or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can be the most [...]

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BEYOND THE COURT GATE: SELECTED POEMS OF NGUYEN TRAI
Nguyen Trai

While Li Po and other classic Chinese poets mostly found expression through landscape, Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai (1380–1422) wrote about his own life. The literary symbols of T’ang Dynasty poetry are relatively general, traditional, and polite, but Nguyen Trai developed a colloquial and personal style. As a result, his poems have the intimacy and immediacy of the everyday. Over six hundred years old, they appear, in this translation by contemporary Vietnamese poet Nguyen Do and American poet Paul Hoover, to [...]

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SHOT
Christine Hume

In alternating currents of prose and verse, Shot reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. Shot inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an [...]

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INCIVILITIES
Barbara Claire Freeman

In her first collection, Barbara Claire Freeman links lyric subjectivity to an exploration of crucial moments in U.S. history. There are meditations on the Declaration of Independence, institution of slavery, Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Civil War, Great Depression, terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as on our contemporary economic and cultural lives. These formally inventive poems braid the personal and the political. They offer no compromise, no synthesis, but they do offer hope as they invite critical reflection [...]

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READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET
by Stephen Ratcliffe

Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage—things like King Hamlet’s murder “while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard,” Ophelia’s death in “the glassy stream,” Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia’s “closet . . . with his doublet all unbraced,” Gertrude and Claudius having sex “in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed.” In a series of brilliantly original “close readings,” [...]

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ROSE ALLEY
Jeremy M. Davies

When violence erupts on the streets of Paris in May 1968, a hapless international film crew finds itself stranded during the shooting of a preposterous low-budget blue movie about notorious 18th century erotic poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. A deadpan and digressive behind-the-scenes catalog of the actors, filmmakers, bystanders, and subjects involved in this movie, Rose Alley is also a fantastical and venomous love letter to French film and literature, obsessive collectors, pornography, language, revolution, misanthropy, the joys [...]

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THERE’S THE HAND AND THERE’S THE ARID CHAIR
by Tomaz Salamun

Poems born in “a time of abrupt needs,” There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair catalogues those individual and imperative fancies that, in the cosmos of Tomaz Salamun, eternity aims to replace: A genealogy of dressmakers and songbirds. A topography of hulking oil tankers and coldwater flats. A biography that locates the poetic “I’” as, at once, a primordial being and a tamer of beasts, a monster and a guardian angel. With uncanny and sometimes harrowing grace, Salamun plumbs every [...]

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THE BRITTLE AGE and RETURNING UPLAND
by René Char Translated by Gustaf Sobin

When Gustaf Sobin arrived in France at the age of twenty-seven in 1963, he befriended the poet René Char, who, as Sobin writes, “taught me my trade.” “René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary. One and the other, the visible and the invisible, were but the interface of a single, singular, vibratory surface: that of the poem itself.” The Brittle Age [...]

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AURA: LAST ESSAYS
by Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin’s final book of essays continues his meditations on the meaning of archaeological vestiges in the south of France. Sobin’s writing synthesizes insights from anthropology, philosophy, theology, and the history of art to produce a spiritual and poetic travelogue through vanished time. Left uncompleted at the end of his life, the present volume would have concluded the trilogy whose first two volumes were published by the University of California Press (Luminous Debris [1999] and Ladder of Shadows [2009]). The [...]

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PLACED
Carol Snow

Placed is a poetic sequence that juxtaposes words, phrases, quotes, and lyric excerpts in the manner of stones in a Japanese dry-landscape Zen garden—karesansui. “Subtexts” identify sources of quotations, ranging from Basho to the Marx Brothers. Time is stilled here, each one or two line poem, for rather than about insight, is both brief and durable, inviting the reader to explore and reconsider a complex of associations. Carol Snow is the author of Artist and Model (selected by Robert Hass [...]

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JULIOLOGY
Nicolas Pesquès

Juliology is an extended poetic meditation on a mountain (Juliau) that is visible from the poet’s house in the Ardèche region of south-central France. Focusing in particular on the flowering yellow English broom that covers the mountain in spring, Pesquès intermingles close observation with a philosophical reflection on the roles and potentials of language. Both lyrical and abstract, both grounded and rangy, the text takes us inward toward systems of representation at the same time that it directs us outward [...]

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DIVERTIMENTI AND VARIATIONS
Heimito von Doderer

A story collection by the acclaimed Austrian novelist of the early and mid twentieth century, Divertimenti and Variations mediates traditional and experimental story technique to explore the authentic self and creates musically-based narrative forms. These narrative experiments were begun in 1923, not long after the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, with its “Sirens” chapter structured like a fugue. Traditional psychological realism combines with four-part “symphonic” experimental form—complete with development, intermezzi, and thematic repetition and variation—to demonstrate how technique is adequate to [...]

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LYRIC POSTMODERNISMS An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries
edited by Reginald Shepherd

Lyric Postmodernisms gathers many well established poets whose work transcends the boundaries between traditional lyric and avant-garde experimentation. Some have been publishing since the 1960s, some have emerged more recently, but all have been influential on newer generations of American poets. Many of these poets are usually not thought of together, being considered as members of different poetic “camps,” but they nonetheless participate in a common project of expanding the boundaries of what can be said and done in poetry. [...]

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY/OUGHTABIOGRAPHY
Anthony Hawley

Through two series of poems, Autobiography/ Oughtabiography explores tensions between memory, erasure, writing, and the self. The title sequence tracks a speaking voice as it works through shards of its past, questioning and, at times, undermining the autobiographical act, often perpetuating its own disappearance. With the second series, “Apple Silence,” the already unstable voice becomes increasingly fragmented, deformed. Anthony Hawley grew up in Massachusetts and received his BA and MFA from Columbia University. He is the author of The [...]

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sexoPUROsexoVELOZ // Septiembre
Dolores Dorantes

sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre are books two and three of Mexican poet Dolores Dorantes’ lifelong project titled Dolores Dorantes. These works consist of fragmented interlocking sequences of poems that create a scaffolding to frame Dorantes’ vivid explorations of the intensely personal and intensely social questions that inhabit the space called “Dolores Dorantes.” Dorantes writes, “May be / I had to forget how…”; it is from within the particular experience she offers of forgetting how that we might, perhaps, begin to remember [...]

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MOPUS: A NOVEL
by Oisín Curran Introduction by Steve Katz

An astounding debut novel, written with courage, innovation, wisdom, style. Oisîn Curran leads us onto a topology of narrative surfaces that appear and disappear seamlessly: subway terrorists in an urban density, a bucolic meadow and stream, postapocalyptic devastation, a ninth century abbey, forty-fifth century conspiracies. The narrative here allows one to enter the creative guts of storytelling, to experience it as a living force. Curran is like Beckett, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, Bernhard, Celine, Faulkner, in whose work powerful prose excavates [...]

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AIR AND MEMORY
Franco Loi

After World War II dialect poetry became widespread in Italy, with the Milanese poet Franco Loi being one of its most prominent practitioners. In the 1970s, a leading critic called Loi “the most powerful poetic personality of recent years,” and since then Loi has been considered one of the most distinguished living Italian poets. Loi was born in Genoa in 1930, but his family moved to a working-class area of Milan in 1937. His father was from Cagliari, Sardinia, and [...]

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THE CRY AT ZERO
Andrew Joron

Here Andrew Joron ranges through literature, science, and philosophy as he maps a poetics that confronts postmodern skepticism and begins from the premise that poets are “chained to the impossible,” that the poetic “cry” exceeds specific social crises. Joron proposes a distinct and obvious place for the unsayable, the abyssal, in our poetic practice. With lucidity and compassion, Joron’s prose works, interwoven here with a series of prose poems, are indispensable in our attempts to embrace a creative space that [...]

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