Death Wish

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

First Nettles collects poems written between 2021 and 2024, from precarious off-key lyrics to sprawling elegies of damaged life. A book of flailing, desperate music, hurt and hopeful, held together by pins and gaffer tape, art and courage and comradeship. Includes the sequence “Seizures” (2022) – “perfect in its openness and lyrical disfigurement” (Danny Hayward).

“[An] exhilarating collection […]. The sequences here are ferociously and admirably radical, with some superb political satire and verve to the poems.”  —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34 

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber; cover collage by Sam Keogh

In the powerful follow up to her critically acclaimed debut collection, poet and activist Fariha Róisín is writing, praying, clawing, and scratching her way out of the grips of generational trauma on the search for the freedom her mother never received and the kindness she couldn’t give.

This collection of poetry asks a kaleidoscope of Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border? Innately hopeful and resolutely strong, Fariha's voice turns to the optimism and beauty inherent in rebuilding the self, and in turn, the world that the self moves through. Ubiquitous to the human experience, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is an illuminating breath of fresh air from a powerful poetic voice.

Book: 11.7 × 18 cm
Book and Glove: 13.5 × 31.5 cm

Presented in a monster glove

Three broken halves of one god walk a city that wants them dead
Their bodies speak in static hunger and rust
Something follows breathing through their mouths
Read it Bleed from it

In A Psalm for the Third Wind, a film script written from 3 perspectives, Damien Troadec is aiming to address in parallel narrative the struggle of having multiples inner voices and the danger of following their distinct desires. One question is raised without any light at the end of the tunnel, confronting the reader to a conflict : THE COMFORT OF MISERY OR THE PAIN OF CHANGE ?

This selection of Gertrude Stein's work is taken from the period between 1905 and 1936, when the iconic modernist poet was engaged in an astounding number of still-surprising literary experiments, whose innovations continue to influence all the arts. Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. 

In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a "continuous present," an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era—from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time. Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative "reading poesis" for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it. 

TEXTS
Melanctha (excerpt, from Three Lives, 1905)
The Making of Americans (excerpt, 1911)
Picasso (1911)
Flirting at the Bon Marche (1911)
Bon Marche Weather (1911)
Orta or One Dancing (excerpt, 1912)
Susie Asado (1912)
Tender Buttons: Objects, Food (1913)
Scenes from the Door (from Useful Knowledge, 1918)
Photograph (1920)
A Movie (1920)
An Elucidation (1923)
If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923)
Fourteen Anonymous Portraits (1923)
Are There Arithmetics (1923)
Business in Baltimore (1925)
Composition as Explanation (1926)
Patriarchal Poetry (excerpt, 1927)
Sentences and Paragraphs (from How to Write, 1930)
History or Messages from History (1930)
We Came. A History (1930)
Stanzas in Meditation (excerpt, 1932)
Lecture I (from Narration, 1934)
Identity a Poem (1935)
What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

DOCUMENTS
“With Apologies to Gertrude Stein,” newspaper advertisement
Two love notes from Stein to Toklas (n.d.): “Dear dainty
delicious darling” and “Ir/Re/Sis/Ti /Belle”
Virgil Thomson, Letter to Gertrude Stein (May 30, 1933)
“Stein Opera Sung by All-Negro Cast,” New York Times (February 9, 1934)
Thornton Wilder, Introduction to Narration (1935)