UpSet Press, Incorporated – förlag

UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad's first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author's preface, and new poems, under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher's note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.

The long awaited 2nd edition of from the warring factions brings back into print Ammiel Alcalay’s book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, site of the massacre of some 7,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995. This daring blend of lyric and document remaps the world we inherit, from native New England to the Roman Empire, from the Gulf War to Palestine and the Balkans. The late Adrienne Rich has called from the warring factions the “kind of poem I’ve been waiting to read.” And in her new introduction, Diane di Prima writes “This book forced me to redefine my life.” Accompanied by an extensive discussion between Alcalay and poet Benjamin Hollander, as well as a new preface by the author, this edition brings an essential text of the post-9/11 world back into the conversation.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the war in Iraq, and 9/11, 'A Little History' explores the deep politics of memory and imagination while proposing a new paradigm for American Studies. With preface by editor Fred Dewey, Alcalay’s book places the work of major figures like Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka, in the realm of resistance and global decolonization to assert the power of poetry as a unique form of knowledge. Recognized by Edward Said as “that rare thing, a gifted prose writer and poet, and an accomplished intellectual,” Alcalay brings his blend of autobiographical and investigative scholarship to bear on this timely and important book of essays.

In the poems of Jennifer Husk the world is a membrane words bounce against and poke into, skating on the scrim then delving below in quick sharp digs of fragment, image, and gut-punch.

A theoretical, mythopoetic work, Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus uses various poetic, narrative and dramatic techniques and devices to fashion a new scriptoral genre, one that is engaged with critical discourses, even while it reads like a labyrinthine story. An aesthetic theory which depicts the path of writing through the deployment of a group of anonymous wanderers and a constantly metamorphosing ‘I’, Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus uses the parameters and the dynamics of the reading experience to construct this treatise on poetics. A work that defies convenient categorisation and tackles, through formal and stylistic innovations, the very possibilities and limits of literature.

Young, clueless, cannibalistic revolutionaries are attempting to take over a serene suburban hamlet—and they are using some very unique methods. A satirical romp through the suburban landscape, Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition is also a study of the dynamics of revolutionary upheaval. It is also about the processes of formal and linguistic invention, about character creation, story-telling, fiction-making, and the fashioning of artistic artifacts out of reality. And, of course, it’s also about parking lots, and traffic flow.

A fifteen-year-old widow runs across a bridge to catch a train bound for Trichi. Sowmya is running away to make sense of the events that had seized her body and her mind, and had ripped apart her world. She is determined to flee her destiny of numbing isolation within her community, the Brahmins of the Thanjavur district in South India. Her plans pivot when she meets a devadasi--an aging dancer--in her compartment. When the woman Mallika opens her drawstring bag and buys Sowmya her dinner, Sowmya recognizes what she needs to overcome her own condition, that of a young woman in possession of a thin cotton sari, a head shorn clean, and little else. She asks Mallika how she too can achieve that kind of power--the power to open a bag and pull out money.Thus begins Sowmya's transformation in the city by the sea, Madras, which is in the grip of its own political and social changes while India is struggling to seize its independence from the imperial British raj. Here she learns the beauty of dance from Mallika, and the sweetness and agony of falling in love with a married man. The cinema brings unimagined opportunities and all the power and riches that she could desire, but it also consumes her relentlessly. When a letter arrives, Sowmya begins her quest to regain everything that had been lost when she once lived in that small village tucked into a little bend of the Kaveri River.

Robert Booras’ clear, open, soulful poems in The New Night of Always handle time with dream-infused immediacy and a kind of slantwise humor built from the politics of grace that is domestic and artistic life in the thick of the big city. They subtly, if insistently, take company as a central need of one’s life, with all the attendant desires and anxieties that sense of need daily conjures, and go at its many angles with shapely precision. It’s the kind of work that serves a range of mind frames, making for a book you can carry around and read all over town." - Anselm Berrigan