Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus

Winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Awards Creative Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.

In this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.

In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is a volte-face of the neoliberal market economy’s construction of isolated, individual safety. In her debut book of poems, Mascarenhas lingers in the question of risk as it arises in daily life and intimacy. Through a close study and partial translation of philosopher-psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s Éloge du risque (2011), her poems posit risk as a fissure, through which we might imagine yet-unknown futures.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Bush Award.

Alisha Mascarenhas (b. 1989) is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021). She has contributed writing to Pamenar Press, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse, Peripheral Review, and The Felt, among others. Alisha was a 2023 resident at La Baldi Artist’s Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she now lives.

There is a body lying across Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk. Here is a book of generosity and perdition, that could not anticipate the death of its author, the one these works are addressed to, written for, dreamt by, in a stream of proximities. A strange dismantling of time occurs as a result of quiet reversals in which light is diffracted across belated syntaxes, reaching past life to the living. Though A Catalogue of Risk is “running past the flowers,” it is a slow text that grieves the day’s illuminations. It is a lesson in transmission in which we, readers, are the apprentices of grace, at the edge also of drowning. Here is a book that has been “hungering to be emptied.” So, too, is it a book of promise.
— Nathanaël

A Catalogue of Risk is a book of luminous attention. Alisha Mascarenhas gives us the language of a mind tracking both internal and external weathers, tuning and returning herself to beauty, fear, grief and desire. Attending a cascade of emotions, the poet dwells in questions, knowing that to keep open to difficult questions is to keep open to desire. That she risks such openness, thinking always with others, through pain and love, is an astonishment. 
— Madhu Kaza

A Catalogue of Risk poses an evocative challenge, one of prismatic nuance: to pursue multiple angles of intimacy along the life-death continuum of how risk holds, unfolds, and makes one whole. “The definition” of what risk is “is shaded in questions” and runs a gamut of desires and sensations at once libidinal and cerebral. Alisha Mascarenhas risks risk itself with this generous offering of exquisite phenomenology and experiential trace in the form of a full-saturation poetics glowing in amplitude and intensity.
— Brenda Iijima

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman’s photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazy yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of “cryptobeauty.”

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.