Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. 

If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians; Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience, which won the 2017 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; and a monograph of ink drawings, Prose Architectures. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

SERIES III is a collection of 8 chapbooks that authenticate Edward Dahlberg's claim that "There is more political energy in friendship than in ideology."

Langston Hughes & Nancy Cunard cement their personal relationship by penning notes across the ocean throughout the Spanish Civil War. After meeting at Black Mountain, John Wieners & Charles Olson remain in close correspondence until months before Olson's death. In "Old Father, Old Artificer," part lecture and part evocation of Charles Olson, Diane di Prima helps to establish how key figures in "New American Poetry" were processing their own past, while the breathless Olson lecture by Ed Dorn erodes the fictive dualism that pits poetic theory against practical action. In his letters, Michael Rumaker invites you to share his life, its radiant pursuit of love, "dirty realism," literature, and lasting community, and Joanne Kyger booms "communication is essential" in her Letters to & from. In Homemade Poems, a gift-book mailed to a friend in 1964, Lorine Niedecker insists that the handmade chapbook is the material continuation of the poems so carefully nestled in its pages.

Breaking up the monolith of the historical lens, Series III continues to track individuals as they tell their stories, cast their lifelines, and position themselves in relation to the times they lived in—and the times we live in—through intimate journals, letters, lectures, and friendships. Edited, annotated, and with accompanying essays, The London Review of Books calls this "a serious and worthy enterprise." Diane di Prima calls the series "a gold mine" and Joanne Kyger writes: "What a brilliant cast of characters. Just exactly what one (myself) would like to read."

SERIES III includes:

Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor)

John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (Michael Seth Stewart, editor)

Diane di Prima: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Božičević, editors)

Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor)

Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (Megan Paslawski, editor)

Letters to & from Joanne Kyger (Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, editors)

Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Anne Donlon, editor)

Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image, the publication considers the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place. Alongside a collection of their works and research, Abigail Lucien weaves written and visual offerings by fellow Caribbean and queer artists, including works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Justin Chance, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Sucking Salt, and Tamara Santibañez, to create an expanded context for their work rooted in friendship and radical love.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator, auntie, lover, and friend. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI).

Lucien has taught as a full-time faculty member and professor in the Department of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In the fall of 2023, they will join the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC. Deli Gallery represents Abigail Lucien.

2 poems written with AI assisted neural network.

In The Infinite Now, Taras Gembik crafts an intimate meditation on solitude, faith, and the search for meaning, ten years in the making. Moving between Ukraine and Poland, these twenty-five poems trace a decade-long journey of self-discovery.

Through stark winter evenings and quiet conversations, Gembik's verses explore ancient and universal questions of existence and identity: the nature of God, the comfort of walls and communion with others, the circular path of memory. The collection transforms everyday moments into profound reflections on love, displacement, how to build community, and the possibility of finding home in transience.

Taras Gembik (born Kamin-Kashyrskyi, 1996, lives in Warsaw, Poland) is a poet, curator, performer, and activist. He is the curator of the public programme at Zachęta National Gallery of Warsaw, where in 2024 he also curated, together with Joanna Kordjak, Siergiej Parajanov's retrospective. Since 2018, he has worked with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to provide a platform for refugees and those afflicted by the homelessness crisis. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he co-created the Sunflower Solidarity Community Centre, praised in an extensive profile in Frieze Magazine, as part of a dossier on "Forms of Resistance".