You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More

New Ancient Words is the first translation of Ellen Lima Wassu's poetry into English. A trilingual edition between her native Tupi indigenous language of the land of Pindorama, now Brazil, Portuguese, and English, this collection offers a wider readership her resistant yet intimate poetry, which flows seamlessly between her relational woes, a decolonial voice, and an animated playfulness with words and imagery. In her poems, history is an unstable landscape, where the personal, the mythical, and the natural are ever entwined and ever shifting in meaning.

Ellen Lima Wassu is a multiartist, freshwater fish, perplexed human, apartment gardener, and more beast than person. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is Indigenous to the Wassu Cocal people (Alagoas, Brazil) and currently lives in Portugal, where she is pursuing a PhD, developing artistic practices, teaching courses, giving lectures, and working as an activist. In addition to contributing to literary magazines and anthologies, she has published ybykûatiara um livro de terra (Urutau, 2023) and ixé ygara voltando pra ’y’kûá (Urutau, 2021). Her practice weaves together art, poetry, performance, activism, critique, counter-colonial studies, essayistic writing, good encounters, river baths, listening sessions, and conversations with flowers.

Translation by Isadora Neves Marques and Alice dos Reis, revised by Marta Espiridião

THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is the debut collection of poetry from a writer who displays a wide-ranging palette for storytelling and folklore in a suite of narrative poems. The collection is built around an ensemble of characters that range from known to unknown, through which Serubiri crafts visually-inspired poems that combine the photographic, the intensely personal, and the scholarly. In his book, he manages to domesticate larger-than-life figures, including Zanzibari-born singer-songwriter Freddie Mercury and Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode. Simultaneously pondered and elastic, Serubiri’s poetry lures these figures – and the reader – into an atmosphere that is only as expansive as the interior landscapes he delineates with each succeeding poem. With this he expresses his own doubts and path, from memories of his native Uganda to New York City, through a psychology of decisions and life choices. 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry. 

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

David J. Melnick published the first book of Men in Aida, a homophonic, but also homoeroticized translation of Homer's epic Iliad, in December 1983 in an edition of 450 at Tuumba Press. After appearing in many guises and fragments, Book Two was published online in 2002 as part of the Eclipse Archive. Book Three appears for the first time in the present publication, which brings together all three books of one of the most important American avant-garde poems. 

According to Sean Gurd, who wrote the introduction to this unified edition: "The labor of more than 20 years, Men in Aïda filters the sound of Homer's Iliad through the words and phraseology of English. Far more than an exercise in homophonic translation, David J. Melnick's epoch-marking poem packs thousands of years of linguistic history into three riotous books."

Presence Detection System is a collection of presence detection systems written between 19015 and 19017 by my mother’s daughter. Its composition was marked by the many things we came to violently disagree about, and it was thought, back then, that an abandonment of comparison could be the only way out. For example, we disagreed and disagree about whether to call what we call ourselves ‘misprisions.’ We disagreed and disagree about where to drape our lone antimacassar, how to clean it, who made it, etc. We disagreed and disagree about what is and isn’t an instance of gambling, which itself is, my mother would joke, “a kind of wager labour.” We even disagreed and disagree about love, even though we experience it, talk about it, act upon it and theorize it in exactly the same way.

Nora Collen Fulton is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

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.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past, its ideas, its personages, its syntax, to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language, whiplike, casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage.

Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.