Manimal Woe

With figures X, Y, and Z, Fanny Howe constructs "a repressed but emotional history" of encounters and unions between races, classes, genders, and epochs. Considering race as "the most random quality assigned to a soul," Howe has undertaken an (American) history of a racially mixed population. The work bears evidence to many creative unions as well: with Ben Watkins, who provided the photographs; with graphic artist Maceo Senna, who illustrated the text; with Nya Patrinos, set designer, video artist, and director of the original production; as well as with composers Miles Anderson and Erica Sharp, whose score adds another voice to the spoken three. The book includes a link to an audio recording of the work, originally performed at the Porter Troupe gallery in San Diego, 1997, with Paul Miles (X), Stephanie French (Y), and Andre Canty (Z). "So whiteness is what is dependent on a witness. / The moon's opaque and egg-like sheen is the kind of zero / that wants to be more than air and negativity."

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily van der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century—she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.

Whether discussing Simone Weil, Gertrude Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she assembled a selection of her writing from the last thirty years into a single, astonishing work.

Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us. —Kaveh Akbar

This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe’s poetry in a new light, and for those who don’t know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet. —Rae Armantrout

Fanny Howe spoke about “the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms.” In This Poor Book she delineates and shifts between these layers to conjure a bewildering yet ultimately galvanizing evocation of the human psyche. We are being warned every day that robots and software will soon replace us. Howe’s poetry makes clear that such a notion is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words. — Claire-Louise Bennett

This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say: “There is a little trouble in my eye.” The irony and beauty of its final line—“There was no more reason to die”—will be with me for as long as my memory of Fanny Howe herself. — Jericho Brown

In her final act of literary alchemy, Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world—haunted by power, estranged from institutions, yet fiercely open to mystery. There’s a radical humility here, paired with a radiant understanding—that doubt can be a form of faith, and that hope, when unflinching, is the most defiant music of all. This Poor Book is for the ages. — Peter Gizzi

This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. A palimpsest of decades’ worth of writing, assembled here into a long poem as fractured and multitudinous as life itself, Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read: “The structure failed to cohere at the end of the struggle. / It had some music in it.” — Maggie Millner

Through Fanny Howe's eyes we look at life differently. She makes us understand that we are part of a mysterious and complex world; one which we urgently need to be receptive to. Beauty appears in unexpectedness, as in “flowers attract scissors” and “why does an eye evolve in the dark?” Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future. — Celia Paul

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. — Adam Phillips

This gorgeous final statement by one of our most perceptual writers is a work of accrued understanding. ... Fanny Howe leaves us with profound investigations into the capacity of words, of juxtaposition, what a line, a page, and a book can give. — Sarah Schulman

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

A series of choreopoems by Eric Peter. Published at the occasion of 'Assemblages of Intimacy' a group exhibition in a Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam in 2018. 

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.