Grenade in mouth

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula Le Giun, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

"The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism." - Julia Bosson

A collection of anti-capitalist poetry, philosophy, cultural analysis, legal studies, manifesto and critique spanning 1996 to the present by Alenka Zupančič, Alexander Kluge, Amy Ireland, Anne Boyer, Aurelia Guo, Bini Adamczak, Carolyn Lazard, Chi Chi Shi, Denis Ekpo, Feminist Judgments Project, Gili Tal, Houria Bouteldja, Huw Lemmey, Keziah Craven, Marina Vishmidt, Nat Raha, Sarah Lamble, Teflon and Vanessa Place.

Divided we fall, but where do we land? This collection explores some of the grounds on which thinking and writing can begin again.
– Sadie Plant

In 1942, butcher Heinrich Angst started to set up his own business in Zurich. Today, Angst AG operates the municipal abattoir and supplies catering businesses and butchers throughout the canton. Angst is a book documenting an installation with 50 used and framed sausage wrapping papers presented at Fondation Fernet Branca in Saint Louis, France. On the other hand the book is gathering 50 systemically relevant poems surrounding writing, everyday life as a dance with obligation and panic, a society without children, fear as a fundamental quality of life and hopefulness to bury fear together. 

The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs.

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

Paperback
252pp
ISBN: 9781739364977

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim with an introduction by Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III.

Feverish from the engrossing revelatory arcs of the uncanny, Glossolalia is a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art. Marlon Hacla—who is a computer programmer as well as a poet and created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal—is a significant innovator in the Philippine poetic tradition. As Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III notes in his introduction, Hacla “eschews the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry. Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century.” This collection of relentless, densely layered prose poems is the third of Hacla’s books to be translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim.

Marlon Hacla is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).