In Abeyance

Jokes is a crash course in psychic disintegration for the genocide generation. Ever wondered what a spoonbill thinks of peremptory norms? Or what a hippo can do with an egg-slice? What’s the secret of the success of men like David Papazian and Johnnie Moore, who get to run the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, while poetry-reading demographics, from the higher and intermediate managerial and professional occupations down to the footwells of unskilled manual self-erasure, lie around standing up for themselves and fornicating with the void? An Author’s a Joke, to all manner of Folk, wherever he pops up his Head, his Head, wherever he pops up his Head, according to Fielding. But why? The 27 jokes of Jokes unfold over the course of a duration-block, in an exclusive interior, under new management, in the capable trotters, paws, hooves, claws, tentacles, jaws, beaks, and blowholes of a fabulous parliament of beasts, some drunk, some dead, some leery, some high, some tender, in the tradition of Boccaccio or Isaiah. They are all funny.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

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

Dear ____,

I happened to look for a while out of “my” window on the 17th floor Palliativstation of the Wiener Allgemeinen Krankenhauses last night, where an enormous orange moon was hanging about, consorting with a lick of dark cloud, near to the tiny gaggle of skyscrapers. I didn’t have much to say for myself and so it just sort of looked back at me. 

Every day friends and well-wishers come here and as always I want to run to my room and read a book until they’ve left but for the first time in my life my room is also the room they want to visit, and so I can’t. I wrote down yesterday as best as I could the words of my last long conversation with Marina: there might be more, but the words are running away from her now, which only makes you realise how small and insignificant they are, fleeing from something (from someone) who remains exactly who they were even in their absence: like dust falling from the sun.

* 

A voyage in the insight which comes as a kiss and follows as a curse, made after you ran out of things to say.——first halting efforts at mutual understanding——love letters from twelve years ago. journal entries from fifteen years before lick at the edges like flames. Opaque coloured shadows, projected in three dimensions——of a——future that——has. never ceased to exist and which——Doesn’t——.——.——arrive to speak about their fears.—— Beginning with a naked bathroom selfie. 

An attempt to live nonjudgmentally and without fear, against the desire to be something other than who you were, as a basic form of class hatred, a fear of the common and of everything that happens there, near speechlessness, trailing off, only sometimes coming back to life again, shame dies so that everything else can be saved, and everything else remains present against the background of this absence, beneath the harsh overhead light, as you pull on the pathetic, unassuming string of the pullcord. 

Dedicated to one person, written by one another. “Poems written by / different poets / are my nakedness.”

Lyrical drifts warped by syntax into blizzarding softness; odes to beauty, meaning, and inexperience splintered by history and grammar. An aqueous surface marbled with the lightest possible touch, lost footings arrested by change’s near-griplessness. 

None of this matters. It’s only supposed
to save you from yourself. None of this
matters, when I try to take it out of me into
the world, which to find I can praise
                                                          I go out to

Composed across two winters between late 2022 and early 2024. Contains 43 poems.

“This luscious and needle sharp collection is a real feat of the textual imagination, wow.”   —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34

Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) and J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) are two of the most original and ambitious poets of the contemporary era. Eschewing the conservativism of mainstream postwar British verse and embracing influences from America and Europe, each developed their craft through continuous correspondence and exchange as part of the febrile scene of poetical community and contestation that emerged in Cambridge in the 1960s. Their works over the following decades exhibit frequent shifts in form and style, from Prynne’s radical transformation and dispersal of the lyric tradition to Oliver’s adaptation of dream visions and medieval-inspired verse satires.

Their letters are a record of both the high stakes and playful experiments that constitute the writing lives of two singular poets determined not just to engage with modern political and social life during decades of crisis and upheaval, but to contribute through the circulation and publication of poetry to what Oliver calls “a community of political ethic.” Over the course of more than thirty years of friendship and mutual appreciation, the motivations for, and consequences of, their poems are constantly worked through, tested out, evaluated, and contradicted, always with a view to what the poetry means for the other, for the poetical communities they inhabit, and for the life of poetry itself.

This volume collects for the first time the majority of Oliver and Prynne’s correspondence, allowing new insights into the literary, political, and historical contexts of their lives and writing. An introduction, notes, and appendices provide a scholarly apparatus to situate Oliver and Prynne among the poets and publishers with whom they worked and socialized, and to identify and expand upon their frequent references to an enormous range of source material and reading matter.

“The correspondence between J. H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver is gripping and illuminating, brilliantly edited and completely absorbing. Two great poetic intelligences respond to each other’s work and to the society around them, thinking through the issues at stake in their poetic practice, their differences in approach, the different worlds they inhabit, their shared commitment to writing poetry and their admiration of each other’s work. The letters, complex as their matter can be, repay repeated reading; taken together, over a period of 33 years, they chart the context and creation of some of the most significant work in late twentieth-century poetry. This is an utterly engaging volume, and should be read by anybody interested in poetry and its place in the contemporary world.”—Ian Patterson

“For writers who welcome each other as peers, the exchange of letters is the spontaneous moment of exposure, the drawing out of selves. It is thinking in mutuality. In this thoughtfully edited and carefully, even beautifully, presented correspondence between Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, two of the preeminent poets of the ‘British Poetry Revival’ of the post-World War II generations, we witness two writers of immense gifts thinking with each other, coming alive to thought and, ultimately, a shared world or community of wish. There is life, there is death; there is grief, there is anger – and love – but always there is a seeking, an attempt to arrive at a language for our worlds. Henceforth, one cannot imagine reading the work of either Oliver or Prynne without this correspondence and all that it offers in openings onto what Oliver himself saw as ‘the poet’s full performance [which] is the whole life’s work.’ It is a glimpse into an athanor of poetic creation.”—Michael Stone-Richards

Presence Detection System is a collection of presence detection systems written between 19015 and 19017 by my mother’s daughter. Its composition was marked by the many things we came to violently disagree about, and it was thought, back then, that an abandonment of comparison could be the only way out. For example, we disagreed and disagree about whether to call what we call ourselves ‘misprisions.’ We disagreed and disagree about where to drape our lone antimacassar, how to clean it, who made it, etc. We disagreed and disagree about what is and isn’t an instance of gambling, which itself is, my mother would joke, “a kind of wager labour.” We even disagreed and disagree about love, even though we experience it, talk about it, act upon it and theorize it in exactly the same way.

Nora Collen Fulton is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

Hardly War, first published in the USA in 2016 and finally published in the UK in 2025, splices the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.

The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member.

Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts.

With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

New Infinity is an experimental novella that follows a woman as she lives and dreams her way through the philosophical implications of autoimmune disease. Met by a labyrinth of closing doors, she searches for meaning and connection among fragmented realities and failed relationships, finding infinitude in the healing process of bibliomancy.

Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a glittering cross-genre debut. Weaving surrealist stories with meditative poetics, Hladík invites you into a dream world of degenerative illness, left disordered by the failures of ableism, medical professionals, and late-stage capitalism. Here, everything runs on sick time. Where physical health and financial resources grow scarce, the restorative possibilities of queer love, divination, and self-reclamation grant a defiant, yet often tenuous, abundance. Alive with Hladík’s boundless insight and wit, New Infinity is a powerful addition to the collective body of disability literature.

“I have been waiting for a book like New Infinity for years: a story of disability that oozes over the edges of ‘personal narrative’ into the surreal logics of bodies that will not be made useful under capitalism. Bára Hladík’s prose delights me with its 21st-century metamorphoses, its waiting-room dream logics, and its mystical invocations of a body in pain. Her poetry is a channel to another dimension, but one that is grounded inside our everyday sensoria—’cracking, pushing, pulsing’ like a spine writhing with snakes. Here, embodiment is never extractable from the institutions and economies whose profits are predicated on the question ‘do I matter if / I am only a pulse’? New Infinity insists upon a different kind of mattering, in which missed connections, improper fusions, and fleeting moments command the careful, caring attention that is too often denied them.” – Liz Bowen, author of Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press) and Sugarblood (Metatron Press)

“New Infinity is the most incredible fiction. It explodes the boundaries of this form so as to get to the heart of important truths about the phenomenon of physical pain and of human existence itself. While Bára Hladík’s story draws from a personal experience of survival through a struggle unlike any other, it is an entirely universal tale. In taking us into the most intimate spaces of suffering and narrating a story of a woman navigating a true labyrinth, Hladík shows us a way to face life, with the uncertainties it presents to us all. This novel is at once a profoundly moving story, a brilliant act of creativity, and an existential philosophy. It’s a book I will keep close, so as to revisit— for the thrilling inspiration of its liberated uses of form and style, as well as to learn from Hladík’s honest language, her resilient sense of humour, and her ability to capture the surreal beauty of being alive at all. I felt like I was reading Franz Kafka crossed with a fully unconstrained Anne Carson. I haven’t been so impacted by a book in a long time. It has changed my ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about what it means to be alive.” – Molly Lynch, author of The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult Books, 2023)

“Bára Hladík’s debut book is a blend of poetry and prose that seeks to make sense of a world that is flagrantly hostile and impatient with bodies that neither perform nor conform to the manic impatience of capitalist acceleration. An honest, vibrant, and very real account of a young writer finding a voice.” – Sina Queyras, writer, editor, professor, curator

“Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a stirring pedagogy, philosophy, and witness. This offering of sick hybridity coils in a long, calm, and exhilarating breath while asking, ‘Do the doctors know how to breathe?’ Yes, Hladík’s prose and poems prompt, pain cosmologies are at once funny and incantatory. Each of New Infinity’s oneiric turns reads the body as an oracle and mirror, reminds us we are atmospheric. I would rather live here in this book, relearn how to breathe, than return to the ‘impossible crank’ of normal.” – Jane Shi, writer, poet, editor, organizer

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer, editor and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she began her literary studies in the Creative Writing program at Capilano University in 2011. After studying Technical Writing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Communications from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Briarpatch Magazine, THIS Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s microchapbook Book of Mirrors was selected for the 2019 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and her collaborative artist book Behind the Curtain (Publication Studio, 2018) was an honourable mention for the Scorpion and Felix Prize (2017). New Infinity is Bára’s first book. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, BC.

The playful, inventive, and lyrically quick poems comprising The Grimace of Eden, Now orbit the strange space halfway between Tennyson and the Metaverse, veering between the natural world and a sci-fi universe, between inner feelings and outward observations, with questions of divinity alongside domestic life, spiders, dishes, and spaceships. The roving eye of these poems wanders through spacetime carrying irreverent theologies and exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate, and awake in this weird moment in time, exposing a mixture half of awe and half of madness. 

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat Books, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (Fonograf Editions, flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). Occasionally a visiting poetry professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, they live in the Arkansas Ozarks alongside three loyal, sentient pets, and the continuous void.