Hello Cruel World

Rodrigo Quijano’s An Inherent Tear assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay “A Terrace in Valparaiso,” translated into English for the first time by Judah Rubin. Written during the Fujimori years of the 1990s—a period characterized by the end of the conflict between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgency, the Peruvian army, and the Marxist-Leninist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—Quijano’s bracingly mournful and incisively wry poems insist that we not turn away from the unburied dead. Shifting between neo-baroque hermeticism and a poetics of the conversational, his work destabilizes lyric subjectivity, testing the limits of the structure of metaphor to relay the impasses of the present. Reflecting almost twenty years later from the “city of wildfires,” Quijano’s essay charts the continued landscape of state violence that carries with it the “payroll of bones” Cesar Vallejo evoked nearly a century earlier. In this new, searing collection, Quijano searches amid the smoke and the ashes for “A place to spend the night, / or a language to speak in, / walking through the desert, or drilling into our / insubstantial dreams.” 

About the author
Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, São Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

About the translator
Judah Rubin is the author, most recently, of Antiquarian Historiography (Oxeye Press, 2020). Recent translations can be found in the anthology The Beauty Salons/Salones de la Belleza (Aeromoto/Gato Negro/UNAM, 2021), the journals Firmament and Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum and lives in Queens, New York.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time. 

Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry, and nominated for a New Yorker book prize. It was superseded by the 2005 expanded second edition including four later collections only previously available in limited editions, and that in turn by the 2015 third edition including another six. Poems includes his 1969 collection The White Stones - central to his poetics - which was reissued in 2016 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Peter Gizzi.

Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) is widely considered one of Brazil's most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar.

Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled Poâetica Secreta (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica's global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection.

This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica's art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory