Meditations

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.

With this new book of sedimented lyric, John Wilkinson’s poetry enters a terrain of creatures flattened in shale, in flat screen and in digital code. If Silicon Valley would repopulate Jurassic Park and defeat death, Wilkinson’s poetry would make actual what slides past in the disregarded day, whether the flattening of a city or the return of seasonal blossom. This poetry swells dry roots; it breaches the total coverage that flatlines the heart’s response, through its urgent and generous rhythms.

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

Peach machine comprises nine months of poems, tracing a recurrent cycle of sickness, heartbreak, reparation, and recovery from late summer back into early Spring. The work is roughshod: grieving, oxygen-starved, jetlagged, reflective, and relieved.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

An English translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” —W. G. Sebald

“In his earliest work … Handke found a way of conveying a state of mind … where words seem to come between you and the world, where nothing coheres or appears natural, and from the vantage-point of which the ease with which other people talk and go about their business seems deeply suspicious. But just as Kafka felt there were moments when, miraculously, a written sentence – even one written by himself – seemed full light, seemed to fill its own space and establish its own rhythm, and when even the whole story seemed mysteriously to stand as solidly in the world as a tree or a rock, so it has been with Handke. He has, in his later work, appeared to make a conscious effort to escape from the debilitating awareness of his own lack of authority or authenticity, and tried to write as though somehow the story were already written, had, in a sense, always been there… Repetition is the triumphant climax of his career so far…

What saves the book from the sort of sentimentality we find in John Berger’s recent work is first of all Handke’s uncanny ability to convey what it is this urge for pattern has to overcome, and secondly, his extraordinary attention to detail, historical, geographical, botanical, and linguistic. (No review can possibly convey the richness of Filip’s meditation on his brother’s two books, or Handke’s magical way with images.)

His narrative … is one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth.” —Gabriel Josipovici

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

Poems written in Berlin between September 2015 and the Summer of 2017. This pamphlet contains selected work from the pamphlet Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou, previously published in a limited edition, and an ongoing sequence entitled Our Death, as well as other pieces from the period. These are poems haunted by catastrophe, light, fires, the sun, violence and love. As Bonney writes: “We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words really mean, and what they will come to mean”. Drawing on writers like Baudelaire, Artaud, Anita Berber and Hölderlin like “marks on a calendar”, “a kind of cacophony”, or “the beginnings of a map”, these poems are vital indices of where we are.

Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR is a book haunted—by empire, by sleeplessness, by Sappho herself. In it, queerness becomes both the agent of terror and its object. “I want to be consumed. I want to disappear twice.” Extending the experiments of Mayer, Lonidier, and Stein, Modeya’s poems are as much about desire as they are about violence. They let us in on a secret: “Logic sometimes is so disgusting.” At once delirious and hyperalert, performance and document of a performance, SAPPHO TERROR disrupts the routines of everyday life from within. “Tending to the eros of writing something down.”

A fist is something that blooms inside a lover, a hand held up in revolutionary camaraderie, and the weapon of bare-knuckle combat. In Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR, the poet probes, in a language that possesses an addictive deliquescence, the body as policy and the devotional as daily, where intimacy is all at once risked, tenderized, and disciplined. We begin in a space of betweenness—between street and bed, between conquest and abandon—and are then submerged into tidal pools of sleeplessness where the poet is overtaken, exquisitely, by forces beyond themselves. Sculpted into vigilant word-reliquaries, these poems exalt the femi-themme of the night while holding fast to danger. Inside this edge-space lives the chasm—the danger that lives in the distance from one edge to another—where sex, politics, and liminal states of consciousness collide, exposing how power is enforced, negotiated, and sometimes utterly undone through the body. —Valerie Hsiung

In SAPPHO TERROR Maura Modeya drifts with eros between the “war intestine,” and a restless dreamscape where desire demands disorientation and the rapture of invasion teeters in tension between queer love and the horrors of militaristic and domestic terrorism. Modeya offers us a vulnerable and familiar sorrow: “Why when I want to speak of love, violence surfaces?” In communion with Sappho’s fragments—those invocations of desire intensified by their historical devastation—Modeya’s poems project that eros is to want is to risk.

Leaning into the “deathless language” of queer love, Modeya allows herself to be haunted by the unreasonable logic of eros and finds herself caught between an insomnia that threatens the poet’s coherence of self, and a sleep that risks waking to the repulsive logics adorning our daily violences.In striking and visceral exhaustion, this book performs the desire of possession—by a lover, by language, by loss. SAPPHO TERROR brings us into the poet’s rapture, one that is profoundly balanced between the paradoxical and perilous forces of eros. —Serena Chopra

What arises out of sleeplessness? In SAPPHO TERROR, all boundaries fall away into ritual. There is a permeability, an eros, a freedom from all structures and institutions, even from our own self. Our human guardrails fall away to a place where we forget the boots on our necks, that our money buys weapons for the state, or even that we are separate unique beings. Is it wrong to forget, or is it a healing? Perhaps both. Modeya says that in sleeplessness, “to submit means to surrender into what is wanted so badly.” In the face of terror, our letting go is a kind of purity. It tells us we can travel beyond repression, not to escape, but to reach the most natural state of our being, even before survival. It is a reminder of life. —Samuel Ace

Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR takes back Plato’s Cave for the dykes. In these poems eros’ shadows reign sovereign: language is chained and casts haptic forms onto Modeya’s bedroom wall lit by Sappho’s famous fires. These poems join her chorus of “You Burn Me” with the desperate velocity only the insomniac knows. Modeya’s verse is exquisite and relentless, creaking out of the dead of night, bargaining for the possibility of touch. An assembly of aching towardness, SAPPHO TERROR is part elegy, part manifesto, part love letter that sabotages the war intestines we live in order to undivide us from our desire. —Rosie Stockton