A Horse at the Door

All My Dead Jesters is an assembly of select poems previously published in de Vries’ first two English language collections—Dark Hour and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018 and 2021 respectively). These old works have been lightly revised for republication, and are paired with poems drawn from a manuscript-in-process to institute an autotelic kaleidoscope of some ten years worth of work in verse. 

De Vries’ poems are spare, terse and epigrammatical—a barroom Bashō—dedicated to the glimmer of a compact glance; the chance, glamour and negative capability of a passing thought; and the slow drip of liquid crystal as colours our present. All My Dead Jesters is a torch song for our ‘poor subjectivity,’  a slow dance with sour times, a ‘[steering] away from [the] gratuitous provocation’ that litters our contemporary outlook. ‘Her competence as a poet lies in her ability to translate visceral vulnerability’ for the page (The Kelvingrove Review / University of Glasgow), as she patchworks a heroic ‘poetry without [a] hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, [...] the map of a world we like to think we know’ [CA Conrad].

Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.

Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.

Help brilliantly extends Steven Zultanski’s current phase of writing—looser, more documentary, more situational. In setting up explicit objects of inquiry and conversation—love, death, childhood—the book shows that to know these things is to also know our friends and ourselves. Sustained by an orchestration of relation and memory (and thus reality), affect here is modular, the product of what happens when we transform things by talking about them. A careful and astute experiment in writing and living.
 — Jennifer Soong

An ‘end-times’ philosophical enquiry in which the author argues with stones and geological time to compose a suite of interlinked fragments. An act of lapidary; a five-part antagonisation of the elements; an essay on representation, visualisation and prediction; an ecologue on ecology.

Our age is characterised by the increasing humanisation of a planet that is more and more subject to metaphoric representation and visualisation. 

The memorialisation, anthropomorphism, and narratological charge of time has birthed an intellectual industry in which the summation of history plays out like a hand of cards. A game in which retrospect and hindsight informs our present and sits us ever at the mercy of prediction and chance in a time increasingly defined by catastrophe, and as emergent crises affect every stratum of life and lived experience. We are currently witnessing a mutation of our thinking that disrupts the mythical imaginary that had hitherto confined viruses, climate change and atmospheric turbulence to an unalterable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature.

Tusa’s Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism is the result of a series of lectures and essays—a quintet of pieces published over the course of a four-year period—that, woven together into a new collation of interlinked fragments, calls time on time to consider the new form of planetary realism resultant of this restructuring of the imagination. Tusa presents a cosmic remapping of our modes of thinking that assumes that our contemporary moment is absented from its representability, its history of representations, and all means of explanation, thus remaining open to a sense of its own infinity… Open to an encounter with that which remains absent and unknowable, with neither horizon nor memory available as any weathervane for comprehension and action. Tusa’s work is a scrutiny of our exosystemic condition; a suite of exploratory antagonisms on the need for a new philosophical perspectivism of time, of earth, and a new charter for the foundations of thought and thinking.

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

Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific Muslim philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse.

Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.

Translated and re-translated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry. 

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

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.

Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us. — Megan Milks

Stacy Szymaszek has long been a poet attentive to work, and this attention is of course animated by place – whether the urban quotidian and attendant human dramas of previous books, or her present workplace on a dairy farm in upstate New York. In Essay’s conversational, immediate, vulnerable, affecting and affected poems, Szymaszek turns to cows and to the cow-like exhaustion of humans who labor in service of capital’s voracity. Essay is bent to the workday but not beaten down by it. We are offered a visionary form, boldly attendant to the present, to prolong survival without denying death.“The heart of the matter is to be able to keep / loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity / unpredictability and contradictions.” In Essay, Szymaszek has built a bed of hay where we can break from our labors and daydream about the “livelihood where we can all work / a single day and have enough for the year and the work / of the cows can be ended.” — Alli Warren

In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.

“I wanna ____ all my friends at once”: how would you complete the lyric Arthur Russell wrote for “Go Bang”? In Rainer Diana Hamilton’s hands, “smell” or “touch”—or “talk to,” for Hamilton a near-synonym for “love”—might be more appropriate than Russell’s “see.” Or maybe they’ll have argued us into believing that yet a different faculty counts among the senses, in these poem-essays that swerve from memory to love letter to argument. A narrative of lost and developed capacities, a felt history of class antagonism, a treatise masquerading as a flower, a flower in every organ—Lilacs is rude with ambition, underneath its abundant charm.” —Kay Gabriel

“Every new poem by Rainer Diana Hamilton is a gift in which poetry is made new again.” —Andrew Durbin

Nhã Thuyên’s đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness contains eight poems excerpted from the forthcoming book vị nước (taste of water). To read this work is to be wrenched out of oneself and into the opening and closing world of language: a world in equal parts vegetal, liquid, human, stone, at once bordered river and open sea, enclosed maze and open field; a labyrinth, but a labyrinth of the utmost clarity; a rising or collapsing building made of words that’s not a ‘dwelling’ so much as a refusal to dwell, which is its loneliness and bereftness and consolation and strength, all at once. “Steps here pulled forth by some line of poetry out of time”, such work “fabricate[s] a bed out of sea, build[s] a house out of tremendous immensity”. It’s the result of a lifelong investigation of the Vietnamese language, deep, joyous, scrupulous and sometimes painful; of a lifelong investigation of the whole deep field of history and time as it’s lived deep within the person and in the field beyond the personal that poetic language affords us. This is a realm, not of simple freedom, but of the struggle for the fullest record and the fullest measure towards which a poet can strive. Don’t hide the madness. Don’t be at peace. [D.G.]

NHÃ THUYÊN secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and totters between languages. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing) (2008), rìa vực (edge of the abyss) (2011), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), and bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-] vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019). Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is waiting to see the moon. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow, and learning to quietly speak up with care.

KAITLIN REES is a translator, editor, and public school teacher based in New York City. She translates from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên, with whom she co-founded AJAR, the small bilingual journal-press that organizes an occasional poetry festival. Her translations include moon fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019), words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and the forthcoming book of poetry taste of water.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.