Hurricane Season

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems(winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.

In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people’s happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake.

The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Aboard the interstellar Six Thousand Ship, the human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. In chilling, crackling, and exhilarating prose, The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

The Consequences is a hybrid collection of prose and poetry; an autofictional examination of the pain of a transatlantic relocation from New York to the blanketing beige of Paris to rejoin a totemic muse. It also focuses on corgi attacks, Maryland, painful anxiety, the struggle to accept the things one cannot change, the third party and the past as adamantine shackles. The "towering sexual iconography of Mike Immerman" looms over the disorientation of a reluctant resident in “the City of Light.”

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.

An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

A horror story of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's The Formation of Calcium is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected.

Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she's grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.

Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.