Love Is Colder Than the Lake

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

An extraordinary collaboration by an award-winning duo—poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed–that bears witness to the genocide in Gaza.

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media—including their own—in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, this book will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

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)

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.