New Infinity

Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.

knot body was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs (Metonymy Press), won the 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.

“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on how to love each other in all our dignity. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.” – David Chariandy, author of Brother (Penguin Random House)

“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.” – Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me (Arsenal Pulp Press)

“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House)

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in 2021.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love. Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers.

Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have."

In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she assembled a selection of her writing from the last thirty years into a single, astonishing work.

Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us. —Kaveh Akbar

This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe’s poetry in a new light, and for those who don’t know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet. —Rae Armantrout

Fanny Howe spoke about “the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms.” In This Poor Book she delineates and shifts between these layers to conjure a bewildering yet ultimately galvanizing evocation of the human psyche. We are being warned every day that robots and software will soon replace us. Howe’s poetry makes clear that such a notion is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words. — Claire-Louise Bennett

This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say: “There is a little trouble in my eye.” The irony and beauty of its final line—“There was no more reason to die”—will be with me for as long as my memory of Fanny Howe herself. — Jericho Brown

In her final act of literary alchemy, Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world—haunted by power, estranged from institutions, yet fiercely open to mystery. There’s a radical humility here, paired with a radiant understanding—that doubt can be a form of faith, and that hope, when unflinching, is the most defiant music of all. This Poor Book is for the ages. — Peter Gizzi

This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. A palimpsest of decades’ worth of writing, assembled here into a long poem as fractured and multitudinous as life itself, Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read: “The structure failed to cohere at the end of the struggle. / It had some music in it.” — Maggie Millner

Through Fanny Howe's eyes we look at life differently. She makes us understand that we are part of a mysterious and complex world; one which we urgently need to be receptive to. Beauty appears in unexpectedness, as in “flowers attract scissors” and “why does an eye evolve in the dark?” Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future. — Celia Paul

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. — Adam Phillips

This gorgeous final statement by one of our most perceptual writers is a work of accrued understanding. ... Fanny Howe leaves us with profound investigations into the capacity of words, of juxtaposition, what a line, a page, and a book can give. — Sarah Schulman