Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women

{ENTHUSIASM} is the 7th poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler. It follows highly-acclaimed collections including The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner and Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler. The book's 81 poems are intended as individual pieces in their own right, but are interlinked by subjects including battle and violence, infants and infancy, religion, economy and population, the self, modernity, and the past.

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

T is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. 

From the Afterword: "Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature."

What does a poet say (what does anyone say), when placed on the stand, how answer the binary logics forced like a cage in the legally-grounded violence which splittingly interrogates solidarity, the splitting invocation of law? In answer, T spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. The author writes: “I want the whole text to be a kind of horrific inorganic body with awkward parts, both to replay at the level of form some of the critiques of organicist thinking with reference to nature that the poem tries to articulate, and also, more glibly, to be somewhat like a trans body, awkwardly fitting together with some parts undercutting others”. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door. 

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.

"Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life."— Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple