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This book emerged out of a collaborative writing project that began in 2020 in response to The 3:15 Experiment. The ‘experiment’ involved a group of poets who, every August, would write nightly at 3:15am from wherever they were. It began in 1993 with six poets (Bernadette Mayer, Danika Dinsmore, Jen Hofer, Kathleen Large, Lee Ann Brown, and Myshel Prasad) at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University, Colorado), then continued every August for 22 years, with the group growing to over 25 poets, participating from various time-zones. Four of the initial poets—Mayer, Dinsmore, Hofer, and Brown—compiled The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001), a selection of their middle-of-the-night writings between 1993-2000.

This edition builds further on this practice.

"We started thinking about a reading and writing practice that is shared but still divisible, divisible but not subtractable. The structures created by synchronicity, repetition, and temporal constraint felt generative. We found that these structures produced the conditions for another logic to emerge, a night-time logic. This night-time logic gestured to a different kind of self perhaps, a self somewhere between a waking-I and a sleeping-I, a self emerged through habit. After all, logic is just a habit.

This nightly rhythm has now become a yearly ritual: every October we’ve returned to this shared practice. As Jen Hofer says, it’s just “to see what is there. Merely what is there, merely to see.”(2) The poems in this book have been compiled from our first batch of 1:53’s. We edited them ‘together-together’—together trying to attune to each poem’s internal logic, while also trying to locate a collective voice that (we hope) textures throughout.

(Certainly) any writing idea of Bernadette’s is one worth pursuing. This book is dedicated to Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), and the certainty of possibility her work opens up to us."

on nmp.16: 
english, chicago screw, folio cover, 148 x 210 mm
first edition, edition of 115 (numbered).

Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.

The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

Another Room to Live In is an archive of encounter: a multilingual conversation between fifteen poet-translators, connected through friendship, correspondence, and cross-diasporic gatherings. With work in English, Arabic, and French, the collection moves beyond both language and nation-state, investing instead in transcontinental dreamspaces. Here, translation practices collaboratively transform the poems and reflect the poets’ own experiences of “living” in multiple languages. Complicating any flat conception of identity, the poems presented here seek to revisit and challenge foundational narratives, to rework mythologies, and to do all this through a cross-generational process of translation as poetic communion.

Contributors include: Etel Adnan, Hoda Adra, Sinan Antoon, Mirene Arsanios, Omar Berrada, Sara Elkamel, Safaa Fathy, Soukaina Habiballah, Marilyn Hacker, Golan Haji, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Pierre Joris, Mona Kareem, Souad Labbize, Rachida Madani, Alisha Mascarenhas, Iman Mersal, Aya Nabih, Sarah Riggs, Yasmine Seale, Cole Swensen, Habib Tengour, and Sam Wilder.

Quiet Fires, the debut poetry collection from andriniki mattis, queries the everpresent questions of Black lives. Be it in a bakery in Brixton, London, at a corner on Malcolm X Blvd, Brooklyn, or the pews of Notre Dame, Paris – whether crossing violent borders on land or in gender, we know how it is to be in a familiar place that feels foreign.

As we follow along on bike rides over the Manhattan Bridge or sit alongside queer lovers in Bushwick, mattis reflects on the profound impact of pandemics, indifference, and heartbreak. In these lyrical and intimate poems that interrogate white spaces on the page and in the world with evocative metaphors, we wonder: “is there ever a party if you're always working this skin”— where can we feel safe and loved?  In a world of climate change and the constant “twilight of violence”, be it gun violence or the expectations of capitalism, quiet fires erupt in these errant everyday moments. Centered around the experience of the Black queer, trans body, andriniki gabriel mattis uncovers the complexities of identity and the quest for self-discovery.

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.