Omnidawn Publishing – förlag

A bilingual collection of poems that offers a surreal perspective of urban experience.  This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard’s lyrical poetry is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates an intimate series of poems drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems comprise an evocative distillation of postmodern urban life with a sharp sense of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty and struggles for survival and intimacy. The poems capture the emotional and ecological surroundings of each city and its people. The cities in Brossard’s poems feel surreal and in them dwell survivors of “misfortunes,” living in urban landscapes with their “gleaming debris” and “bridges, ghats, / rivers in a time of peace and torture.” These poems gesture toward a transmuted social context and toward a quest “to meet the horizon the day after the horizon.”

Poetry that seeks kinship and hopeful futures amid traumas of colonialism, displacement, and climate disaster.  The poems of Las Palmas conjure, walk beside, and tarry with the entangled grief of the long histories and violences in which we are all still embedded. Jones offers homage to the anguished beauties and truths that poet Jay Wright once said were “the disturbances” that “our ancestors create in us.” Grounded in musicality and haptics, Las Palmas seeks to salvage and mend while meditating on materiality, loss, cartography, kinship, displacement, coloniality, the “modern” world, and climate disasters. Throughout this collection, Keith Jones finds truth and community amid despair and the cruelest of circumstances, working through traumatic intimacies and mapping new imaginaries.Las Palmas is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, selected by Brody Parrish Craig.

Attempts to reach the moon, metaphorically and otherwise, are an ancient element of human imagination. With intrusions from mathematics and science, these poems are elegiac celebrations of various ambitions that miss the mark, but matter anyway. The poems sometimes center on events in the life of the poet or members of his family; sometimes on the geography, geology, and the histories accrued by local communities, human and otherwise; sometimes they center on historical figures reimagined—from Giacinto Scelsi to Alan Turing. But these poems are always about boundaries and barriers, crossed sometimes, ignored at peril. They are about distances that must be travelled.

Laodicea speaks English sympathetically at the edge of sense, where this world reveals another latent; and this world remains ordinary, just like we like it. In a time when we are told, amazingly, the universe is math, what does this mean for our friendships, for our language? Laodicea reminds, laughingly, that "The mind and the world / together are a Co-Cathedral" - the impulse for love and play.

Some Habits proceeds by way of a series of letters charting the dreams, observations, apologies, and epiphanies of an unnamed addressor. The poem is infected by the vernacular language of the Ozark mountain region, and by the cultural effluvia of the flat lands hemming the Mississippi River. In the manner of the great poetic epistles, Some Habits risks unknowing its subject. Who broadcasts? Who receives?

The last living member of the original circle of Anarcho-pacifist poets at the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance, Richard O. Moore presents his second book, Particulars of Place. The title poem is a meditation on life in the twilight of American Empire, posing the question of how to live in an age of endless warfare. Throughout, Moore's commitment to social justice mingles with his interest in Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, resulting in a poetic amalgam unique to Moore himself. Reflecting a lifetime of devotion to the art of poetry, Particulars of Place confirms Moore's paradoxical position as a newly emerging old master.

From the author's "Memo to the Reader": "if you open this book and expect to / know me you will find both truth // and lie all poets lie and lay and have / lain so discover inside what's mad // or curious yet beware ye who enter / for you may see yourself herein"

Shields call out to the violence from which they also protect us, a paradox that belongs as well to the images etched upon them. In these poems seven shields each suffer a process, one of wounding, and of healing the wound back to song. Shards are what remain of shields, fragment words relict from the first poem. Shards become stitches, barest suture of meaning made only from what language in the shard remains. Last, built upon the stitches, keeping intact what letters and words there remain, seven songs to replace seven shields, born out of a violence they seek only to sing themselves past.

This is a book about deciding not to die - about the obstinacy of being. And it's a book of craft, in which steadiness of presence generates the illumination that flickers through states darkened by steady crisis. The world is blurred, not broken. And a lyric I comes to rest in the world.

u&i is a meditation on the imaginary - what exists and what doesn't, how does something exist when it knows it is imaginary, how is it to be reckoned with. u&i asks what exists when a book is written. u&i is telling a story to the things that are actual loss. Things that are gone become further proof of existence and not. u&i asks what are the can and can't of existence, as well as the cant of existence - the domestic and repeating cant, as things circle themselves until they think they exist a little more. There is, in u&i, cant as incantation.

Every Day But Tuesday is a book of lyric experiments amassed from a space beyond ordinary time, where "this is tomorrow and the sun" stands, reverberating both as precursor and postscript to the apocalypse. The extraordinary world of these poems, coming from the sea, forests, islands, mountains, and rivers, form an utterly new logic of sound patterning and metric sense-making, colliding a series of gorgeous associations with a suite of prepositions forever reconfiguring.

Thigh's Hollow locates the wound Jacob suffers from wrestling with a divine stranger, but in a voice more Esau than Jacob: a "box this telling comes through not of." These transgressions leave a longing in their wake, a fundamentally alienated "nameless crawling upward I." This upward crawl brings us ever closer, through syntactic doubling and punning and play, to genuine communion. Through these bent and brimming poems, we witness a wounded voice trying to heal itself: "my very defenses / grow in me the pearl."

The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. Outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.

In Zach Savich’s new collection, intent seeing makes the present more present. Here clarity is a quality not of logic, but of perception—not of description, but of the landscape itself. The mysteries of grief and joy, of daily desire and loss, resonate fleetingly, a bell struck delicately, struck again. Through his previous four volumes of poetry, Savich has embodied ways of seeing—ardent, fantastical, patient—and voiced the fugitive nature of perspective. In these new poems, language is a sense like any other and yet is everything that may be glimpsed and heard and briefly known.

Our Animal hybridizes novel flaking into poetic forms like a gnat swarm, magnetic filings, or migratory flux. It’s a fierce inquiry into Othering, tracking Kafka’s life through his deep identification with animals, especially those hunted or outcast. Graphically complex with metamorphic text layers, the chapters shape-shift in relation to crows, dragonflies, a frog; there are deer, swallows, a goldfinch, humans, a hybrid Beast, wolf, Insekt, a small unidentified animal in its burrow. We are entangled in biography as biology— paradisiacal transfiguration that leaves out no being.

Witness to the late and sorrowful pact between predator and prey, spectator and species, Molly Bendall’s fifth book beckons the reader into the enigma of animal relation. “What’s left?” she asks. The answer is past remembering, attuned to extinction. Forsaking the names of creatures, Bendall returns like a sleepwalker to a painted habitat of swamps and savannahs, of captivity and display. At once playful and melancholy in its sifting of ritual discretion and shame, Watchful brings every sense, every measure, to bear on the blood mirror of the human.

Squander occupies a place where “the mind’s upstairs windows [are] blown out”: a place of juxtapositional delight through sensory and conceptual dislocation. Poems based in word origins work as fables, and poems based in dialogue work within a select concordance from authors and artists. The consequent subject’s meaning is diverted and new vantage points are created. Squander’s energized music, its alliance with feeling’s final rhythm “makes us complicit” in the re-awaking of language.

Invoking a Mexican slang term that translates roughly as “white girl,” Güera considers how the body’s meaning as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized surface shifts as it crosses linguistic and national borders. Gaydos’s disarmingly direct addresses slip between the spaces of story and reality, traversing the many meanings of “appearance”: not only the physical image and its attendant assumptions, but also the act of arriving or becoming visible. Moving between Los Angeles, Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Talcott, Virginia, Güera traces the way touristic desire, folklore, and stereotype transform the languages we speak and the bodies we inhabit.

Ghost Nets is the first US collection by John Wilkinson. Ranging from brief lyrics to elaborately-structured long poems, the collection displays the intense musicality, syntactical intricacy and affective power characteristic of his poetry. But the political, social and economic crises of the period in the US shape Wilkinson’s writing in new ways, more vulnerable and more evidently responsive to others’ vulnerability.

An advertising copywriter searches for her missing reflection. An artist tries to sculpt clouds. A businessman fades into the atmosphere while an old man drifts over rooftops, his gravity broken. Eleven narrative strands fragment and reform to weave a story of other-worldly ailments and compulsions. As the befuddled narrators cross paths, their lives grow increasingly unmanageable. Told with wit and pathos, the linked tales are comical and strange, yet heartbreakingly familiar. These are the confessions you might hear at a 12-step meeting in a universe of fairy tales and dreams.

The Field traces the I across a constellation of lyric psychodramas, where the voice navigates the daily traumas of embodiment and the force majeure of the out-of-body experience. At its center, this first collection from Robert Andrew Perez is a curation of the perils of love in an age of persistent angst, or the virtues of love from a persistently anxious mind. This I in crisis posits itself in a multitude of lyric containers, vibrating in the tension of terror and ecstasy’s diametric vectors through the curses of memory, emotion and contemplation.

Adam Cannot Be Adam is a text of constantly refracting mirrors providing us with insights beyond mere duality. These deft, inquisitive poems portray two Adams as external characters in an ever-shifting mythos while examining the inner double personae locked in self-confrontation. Kelli Anne Noftle offers kaleidoscopic perceptions of reality using diagrams, mirrors, photography, holograms and painting. The simplicity of Noftle’s language often belies what is exposed, endlessly folding to create new structures from quotidian material. Adam Cannot Be Adam is a holographic portrait of identity and intimacy; each poem reveals an alternate view of the whole, questioning normative ideas about our relationship to self and other.

In her book, Chrusciel maps the biblical event of annunciation onto the current migration crises. Annunciation becomes a symbol of the “yes” that we utter in front of reality, particularly confronted with exiles, strangers—in other words, the other. The book quivers on the brink between openness to the other and the terror the other brings out in us. What does it mean to say “yes” to a stranger? What implications, threats, blessings and responsibilities do “yes” carry? Can we say “yes” to a dislocated soul in order to become more fully who we were meant to be?

Selected by Cathy Park Hong as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom. Part lyric, part autoethnography, part historical document, these poems orbit around the manifold erasures of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Leung, who was in those protests while on a Fulbright grant, navigates the ethics of diasporic dis-identity, of outsiderness and passing, of privilege and the pretension of understanding, in these poems that ask: “what is / freedom when divorced from / from?”

from unincorporated territory [lukao] is the fourth book in native Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series about his homeland, the Western Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), and his current home, Hawai i. He utilizes eco-poetic, decolonial, diasporic, indigenous, documentary, epic, and avant-garde modes to weave stories of creation, birth, migration, food sovereignty, and parenting. This work not only protests the devastating impacts of colonialism, militarism, and environmental injustice across the Pacific, it also expresses a vision of a sustainable and hopeful future.

Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk, of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable-sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.

Selected by Hoa Nguyen as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize Seeking a trans poetics in encounter’s work, the interlocking poems in risk :: nonchalance ask: what more do you want me to risk for our art practice? Gesture originates in bodies moving — no, citation — no, on the page — no, on the bus. In wacky, asymmetrical scale, embodiment’s impossible questions hang on fragments of schema, meta juice bogs down tiny lines, and line breaks signal perceptual shifts through which individual and collective gestures rotate. This is a break-up book, if what is breaking up is the notion that there is a lover or a reader or a non-essentializing feminism waiting faithfully outside the poem, immune to its machinations. The poems document two dance process the author participated in, in Philadelphia and Toronto, during the spring of 2016.

From Unincorporated Territory [hacha] is the first book of native Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series about his homeland, the Western Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Perez weaves avant-garde, eco-poetic, indigenous, documentary, multilingual, and abstract expressionist modes to tell the complex story of Guam’s people, culture, history, politics, and ecologies. Since its original publication in 2008, [hacha] has received positive reviews, and it has been taught in universities throughout Asia, the Pacific, the United States, Canada, and Europe. This new and revised edition aims to bring the book to a new generation of readers.

The elegies that comprise Richard Greenfield’s third book of poems, Subterranean, open the rhetoric of the form in new ways, creating a site of grieving that transcends a focus on the death of the father. Though lyrical, these elegies juxtapose the collapse of hyper-economies against the collapse of ecosystems, exploring the overlap, or edge effect, of liminal encounters between the living and the dead, between the city and the wilderness, between the human and the animal, and between the haves and the have nots. Greenfield creates a sequence of associative, anxious, rambling, and digressive meditations bridging these harrowing divides and exposing the loneliness of grief and empty promise of connection in the age of late capitalism. Greenfield asks, “Do you want to call someone?” The human voice, transmitted through the cell phone, becomes a spectral voice and streams “up from the basin to the peak and its antenna and striates and sieves through solid structures to arrive in the spiral of the ear of anyone.