Nightboat Books – förlag

“Part fairy tale, part radical manifesto, entirely unequaled.” —The New York TimesA facsimile edition of the classic 1970s book with new essays and archival material.The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, written by Larry Mitchell with illustrations by Ned Asta, takes place in a brutal empire in decline, where the faggots and their friends are surviving the ways and the world of men. Beloved by many since its original publication in 1977, now with new essays by Morgan Bassichis and Tourmaline, this book offers a trenchant and irreverent critique of capitalism, assimilation, and patriarchy that is deeply relevant today.

A new volume of aphoristic prose and philosophical poetry from Etel Adnan, whose work The New York Times recently described as the “meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism.” She writes: “Reality is messianic/apocalyptic/ my soul is my terror.”

Etel Adnan’s evocative new book places night at its center to unearth memories held in the body, the spirit and the landscape. This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.

A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art. In these interviews with journalist and editor Laure Adler, conducted in the months before her death in November 2021, Etel Adnan traces with depth and emotion the founding experiences of her artistic approach, between poetry and painting. From her youth in Lebanon, her American years in New York and California, to her late recognition at Documenta in 2012 and her life in France, the conversation covers philosophy, painting, poetry and aesthetics, as well Adnan's views on history and politics in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. These transcripts usher the experiences and observations of Adnan's long and rich life into an intimate and spontaneous conversation with a dear friend—a window on the “universe” of her imagination.

Caroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.

A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century’s most beloved French gay writers.My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his master’s finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master’s wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won’t let him watch variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.

WINNER of the INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZEWINNER of the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARDFINALIST for the 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDOn October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic. As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Sex Goblin channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.

Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ AnthologyFinalist for the 2021 Publishing Triangle Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureA collection of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

This marks the publication of the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant's classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the "way of the world." Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant's Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Named a Must-Read Book of 2023 by Nylon, Bookriot, Vulture, The Millions, and Ms. MagazineA baroque work of intimate myth exploring one woman’s interdimensional search for beauty and embodiment, through kaleidoscopic renderings of hospital corridors, brutal breakups, and passionate romance.The Fifth Wound is a phantasmagorical roman à clef about passion as a way of life. In one dimension, this is a love story—Aurora & Ezekiel—a separation and a reunion. In another, we witness a tale of multiple traumatic encounters with transphobic violence. And on yet another plane, a story of ecstatic visionary experience swirls, shatters, and sparkles. Featuring time travel, medieval nuns, knifings, and t4t romance, The Fifth Wound indulges the blur between fantasy and reality. Its winding sentences open like portals, inviting the reader into the intimacy of embodiment—both its pain and its pleasures.

These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.

An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden’s most influential and beloved poets.In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of “clear velocity.”

Named a "Must-Read Queer Book" of 2026 by Language Arts newsletterB-Dragon Suite is a hybrid poetry collection that remixes K-pop, experimental translation, sound art, and emoji poetics to explore Korean diasporic identity.This debut book of poetry treats translation as play, performance, and embodied sound. Across seven interlinked sections, Stine An stages a fabulated K-pop universe, complete with boy band LIL BANG and girl group The Pink Blossoms, alongside lyric poems and prose meditations that code-switch between Korean and English. The book situates K-pop as both pleasure engine and cultural archive, asking how language survives colonial history, migration, and spectacle without resolving into easy consumption.

On the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John received the Book of Revelation, two writers find themselves mired in an uneasy sense of timelessness, where history and the present jumble together. As they hunt for a lost portrait of the iconic gay novelist Hervé Guibert, they discover that the island’s insistent isolation from the global catastrophe surrounding it, from the refugees interned on nearby Samos to the fascist rise in Europe and the United States, is more pose than reality.

The chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy.Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.

The Pink Trance Notebooks is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of "trance notebooks" as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis - voiced with aplomb and always on point. "Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity." - John Waters

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.

This book gathers a decade of Caroline Bergvall's innovative pieces, from her long out-of-print performance text Goan Atom, inspired by the graphic contortions of Hans Bellmer's Doll and violent love fantasies of other radical body-inspired artists, The Shorter Chaucer, a series of contemporary tales exploring social mores in a feisty mix of languages, and the hybrid and visual prose pieces Cropper, Cat in the Throat, and Middling English. This volume-rich, multi-layered, acerbic, humorous-creates a strong case for how new literature can provide speculative and performative excursions into post-urban lives and idoms and explore renewed visions for languages.

This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

Kathleen Fraser's inventive new book showcases poems from four recent collaborative artist books that exhibit "her longtime love of words as objects into play" (The New York Times). These new poems, many created through her unique collage and hand paste-up techniques, continue Fraser's ambitious exploration of the boundaries of language and the limits of the page.

Taking Walt Whitman's Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern's Music for Porn moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor.

Written during an autistic breakdown after his father’s sudden death, Sweeney’s visionary elegy for the living occupies the voice of the newly dead. Through shifting identities, genderless, omnigendered, bereft and haunted, this work affords an intimate mapping of grief—and a vision of what consciousness remains after the body.

Alisoun Sings finds its starting-point with Chaucer’s iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Her forceful voice leads the way across narratives of genders, and addresses the brutality of social conventions with caustic humor. This labyrinthine text navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English, beyond its dominance as a global lingua franca, and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages.

Winner of the 2020 Four Quartets PrizeFinalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay PoetryLonglisted for the 2019 National Book Award in PoetryFinalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryFinalist for the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardBrian Teare offers a new kind of nature poem for the late Anthropocene in these plein air meditations on the pleasures and perils of everyday life during global climate change.Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

Hatred of Translation thinks through translation with an emphasis on its disaggregation. These pieces address, sometimes obliquely, often with effrontery, the works of René Char, Hervé Guibert, Hilda Hilst, Danielle Collobert, Frankétienne, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kobayashi Masaki, and Marguerite Duras. Resolutely resistant to anything resembling a theory of a thing, these pieces provoke a persistent commitment to thinking in the place of theorizing. Where the French pensée means both of aphoristic thought and of the pansy, Hatred of Translation seeks a garden in the midst of body such as it is occupied by language.FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDS

Comfortable neither with the self who is made entirely through autonomy or genealogy, SPEECH tracks the western-world idea of freedom, asking whether the person who believes they can say and write whatever they want is more free or less aware of the nature of free speech as a right everywhere. Formally, SPEECH invokes the action of walking and weaving: enjambed lines that accrue, building pages vertically through repetition of sound, syntax, and metrical patterning. In the book, a woman walks, threading her way through a cityscape that overlays west and east, here and there, past and present, self and other, creating a place and person neither and both.