Phoneme – förlag

Diorama is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocio Ceron, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes. As unrelentingly tactile as it is unapologetically cerebral, Rocio Ceron's new book asks that we relinquish control and submit to the poet's brutal lyricism, and to a new kind of order imposed like a penumbra between us and the waking world.

Uyghurland collects over two decades of Ahmatjan Osman's poetry in Jeffrey Yang's collaborative translations from the Uyghur and Arabic. Osman, the foremost Uyghur poet of his generation, channels his ancestors alongside Mallarme and Rimbaud, observing the world from exile. Born in 1964, Osman grew up in Urumchi, the capital and the largest city of East Turkistan. In 1982 Osman became one of the first Uyghur students to study abroad after the end of the Cultural Revolution, spending several years at Damascus University in Syria studying Arabic literature. He later returned to China where he struggled to find work because of "security" issues with the Chinese government.

Like A New Sun features poetry from Huastecan Nahuatl, Isthmus Zapotec, Mazatec, Tsotsil, Yucatec Maya, and Zoque languages. Co-edited by Isthmus Zapotec poet Victor Teran and translator David Shook, this groundbreaking anthology introduces six indigenous Mexican poets--three women and three men--each writing in a different language. Well-established names like Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) appear alongside exciting new voices like Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque). Each poet's work is contextualized and introduced by its translator. Foreword by Eliot Weinberger. Poets include Victor Teran (Isthmus Zapotec), Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque), Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec), Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya), Juan Hernandez (Huastecan Nahuatl), and Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil).

It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire collects poems from Serbian poet Zvonko Karanovic’s entire oeuvre, translated by Ana Božicevic. Karanovic is “a counter-cultural icon [who] writes in a vivid, sophisticated vernacular of desire and transcendence amid cultural and political change” (PEN Translation Fund Advisory Board). He has traveled widely throughout Europe, hitchhiking and often changing jobs, including owning a music store for 13 years. For many years he has been an underground cult figure and a seminal influence on a generation of younger poets.

Reminiscent of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, Oleg Woolf's Bessarabian Stamps -- a cycle of 16 stories set mostly in the village of Sanduleni -- is a vivid, surreal evocation of a liminal world. Sanduleni's denizens are in permanent flux, forever shifting languages, cultures, and states (in every sense of the word). Woolf has relocated magical realism to Moldova. With the turmoil in current Russia and the post-Soviet world, Bessarabian Stamps emphasizes the absurdity of the mundane.

Having achieved professional success in Barcelona at the expense of family life, best friends Montse and Roser are dissatisfied and sexually frustrated. Over an evening cognac, the two friends hatch a plan to find one of Barcelona's many illegal African immigrants, whom they plan to employ as the object of their sexual desires. When Montse finds Bambara Keita on a park bench at the Plaza de Cataluna, she know he is the one, and invites him home. Keita's rags-to-riches experience means sacrificing some of his values in order to survive, as the two women take turns hosting -- and hiding -- him at their homes. When Roser is offered an attractive new position in Berlin, Keita is forced to make a difficult decision.

Natalia Toledo's The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems, with an award-winning translation by Clare Sullivan, describes contemporary Isthmus Zapotec life in lush, sensual detail. In Toledo's poems of love and loss the world's population turns into fish, death is a cricket, and naked women are made of wet magma. The Black Flower won the Nezhualcoyotl Prize, Mexico's highest honor for indigenous-language literature, in 2004. FINALIST FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD! LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD!

Rilke Shake's title, a pun on milkshake, means in Portuguese just what it does in English. With frenetic humor and linguistic innovation, Angelica Freitas constructs a temple of delight to celebrate her own literary canon. In this whirlwind debut collection, first published in Portuguese in 2007, Gertrude Stein passes gas in her bathtub, a sushi chef cries tears of Suntory Whisky, and Ezra Pound is kept "insane in a cage in pisa." Hilary Kaplan's translation is as contemporary and lyrical as the Portuguese-language original, a considerable feat considering the collection's breakneck pace. WINNER OF THE 2016 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD! WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD! FINALIST FOR THE 2016 PEN POETRY TRANSLATION PRIZE! "No fabled saudade here, but the sound of an ocarina underwater in the Orinoco." --Paul Hoover "Wry, painfully funny and moving, Kaplan's translation captures the formal invention and deadpan beauty of the original perfectly." --Sasha Dugdale

The poems in Against the Current expose a mind moving fast as water. Tedi Lopez Mills renders a river as a cool but contaminated space, propelling its detritus through a hybrid rural/urban zone that is inhabited by allegory and rife with collision. As the poems swim upstream, they accrue the impurities and complicities of memory, embodied in the central figure of the brother who is also the other. Wendy Burk reproduces the baroque, occasionally frenetic rhythms of the abecedarian original with lucidity, in these poems that underscore that Mexico is defined by physical and philosophical contrast.

The End of the Dark Era is the first book of Mongolian poetry to be published in the United States, and one of the few avant-garde collections to have come from the vast steppes of Mongolia. Poet Tseveendorjin Oidov, who is also one of Mongolia's most renowned painters, traverses the Mongolian dreamscape in poems populated by horses, eagles, and a recurring darkness that the poet dissipates with his startling descriptions and abiding empathy. The short poems of the book's second half are accompanied by 32 of Oidov's abstract line drawings.

In 1972, inmates Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodbox, and Herman Wallace were put in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary (a.k.a. Angola Prison), after being convicted under questionable circumstances for the killing of a prison guard. Because of their work organizing on behalf of the Black Panthers, Robert King spent 29 years in solitary confinement before his conviction was overturned and he was released. Wallace was released in 2013, after more than 41 years in prison, and days later of liver cancer. In November of 2014, Woodfox had his conviction overturned by the US Court of Appeals, and in April 2015 his lawyer applied for an unconditional writ for his release. As of June of 2015, that release has been blocked by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite documentary films, a long-running campaign by Amnesty International, and appeals from the murdered prison guard's widow, Albert Woodfox remains the longest-serving U.S. prisoner in solitary confinement. What is it like to spend decades in solitary confinement for a crime you did not commit?Panthers in the Hole relates the experience of three men whose lives were snatched away by a prison system that seems more at home in a totalitarian regime than America.

Engineer Kamran Khosravi wants to die in a car accident. His professional life in the Iranian hinterlands is full of bureaucratic drudgery -- protecting dams, for example, from looters. His wife Fariba can no longer stand it, and has left him to rejoin her family in Isfahan. She is anxious for him to choose a life with her, or to let her go and persist with things as they are. But Kamran's issues run deeper than anybody imagines. He has lost all feeling for his wife, and his plans for a car accident are escapist, not suicidal. He is having an affair with a married country girl, and thoughts of her lead him to foolish distraction. Most recently, he's found a day laborer who matches his approximate build and hair color, and his intentions grow increasingly dark, along with his nihilistic outlook. Rituals of Restlessness won the 2004 Golshiri Foundation Award for the best novel of the year and was named one of the ten best novels of the decade by the Press Critics Award in Iran. However, in 2007 Yaghoub Yadali was sentenced to one year in prison for having depicted an adulterous affair in the novel.Rituals of Restlessness and his short story collection Sketches in the Garden have been banned from publication and reprint in Iran.

Having achieved professional success in Barcelona at the expense of family life, best friends Montse and Roser are dissatisfied and sexually frustrated. Over an evening cognac, the two friends hatch a plan to find one of Barcelona's many illegal African immigrants, whom they plan to employ as the object of their sexual desires. When Montse finds Bambara Keita on a park bench at the Plaza de Cataluña, she know he is the one, and invites him home. Keita's rags-to-riches experience means sacrificing some of his values in order to survive, as the two women take turns hosting — and hiding — him at their homes. When Roser is offered an attractive new position in Berlin, Keita is forced to make a difficult decision.

When leftist revolutionary Sergio's sniper shot misses the President of Venezuela, he's thrown into a sudden tailspin. As he attempts to escape the increasingly militarized regime, he winds up taking residence in a bohemian beachside commune, where he keeps a low profile until Lourdes, his former comrade, the object of his desire, and his possible betrayer, turns up one evening. Pursued by their former trainer in guerrilla warfare on the orders of the newly appointed Minister of the Interior, the two team up with unlikely partners to hatch a new plan for their survival. This poetic thriller, the second in Phoneme Media's City of Asylum imprint, challenges the origin myth of South America's radical left, resulting in its author's exile from Venezuela.

In his poems of memory and displacement, Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi charts his experience of exile with vivid, often haunting, imagery and a child's love of language. Lyn Coffin's translations from the Persian allow Emadi's poems to inhabit the English language as their own, as the poet recasts his earliest memories and deepest loves over the forges of being "someone who goes to bed in one city and wakes up in another city." Alternating between acceptance and despair, tenderness and toughness, he writes, "I wanted to be a physicist," but "Your kisses made me a poet." Mohsen Emadi is a powerful witness to life in the present times, and Standing on Earth introduces a major world poet to an English-language readership for the first time.

Ebamba's name means "mender" in Lingala, but everything in the Congolese twentysomething's life seems to be falling apart. In the chaotic megacity of Kinshasa, the educated but unemployed young man must navigate the ever widening distance between tradition and modernity -- from the payment of his fiancee's exorbitant dowry to the unexpected sexual confession of his best friend -- as he struggles with responsibility and flirts with temptation. The first novel to be translated into English from Lingala, Mr. Fix It introduces major new talent Richard Ali A Mutu, who leads a new generation of writers whose work portrays the everyday realities of Congolese life with the bold, intense style associated with the country's music and fashion.

In his biting first full-length collection in English, Tijuana poet Roberto Castillo Udiarte commiserates with Zona Norte streetwalkers, embodies the desert lizard, and maps a life lived in the dimness of the barroom -- as well as its incisive light. The poems in Smooth-Talking Dog display the counterculture influence of a wide range of influences on both sides of the border, from both the page and the rock concert stage, as hilarious and tragic as they are deadly serious. Celebrating Baja California's status outside the Mexican literary mainstream, Smooth-Talking Dog proves just how permeable the aesthetic border between the U.S. and Mexico really is.

Magnus Sigurdsson spare poems pay rare attention to the minute revelations of nature rather than allowing the crudeness of machinery to bulldoze our sentiments. Through intricate wordplay and a titanic understanding of his native Icelandic, rendered with perfect tone by award-winning translator Meg Matich, Sigurdsson creates tiny but arresting artifacts--fragments that scale an instant to an aeon, and a thousand millennia to a second. Whether describing the dwarf wasp's one-millimeter wingspan or the roots of a bonsai, he is a cosmologist of language, and Cold Moons is an intimate map of his distinctive universe.

This collection of poems from one of Poland's most unique contemporary writers, Grzegorz Wroblewski, demonstrates his characteristic virtues: an objectivist stance, anthropological focus, and epigrammatic concision. However, new elements are beginning to assert themselves as well. Wroblewski experiments with a more extensive use of found material--the preferred technique of English-language conceptual writers, which here acquires a distinctly Eastern European flavor, as well as with a lyrical candor that teases his readers with glimpses of his most private feelings. Bleak and terse, Wroblewski subjects his material to almost clinical treatment in order to better dissect and so understand the series of events that we call reality.

Croatian War Nocturnal is a fictionalized memoir of the wars in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, told from the perspective of a Croatian Esperanto activist and teacher. Composed on an early machine-translation computer while the author hid in her bathroom during bomb raids, the book consists of short, interconnected episodes describing the daily traumas of war and genocide and their effect on life and family, memory and language. Told in a unique and elegant staccato style, it’s an emotional account of a woman trying to make sense of the seeming collapse of the two utopian projects that have framed her life—Yugoslavia and Esperanto. At turns somber and darkly witty, Croatian War Nocturnal is a work of enduring optimism, a cry for peace against violence and indifference.

David Avidan was himself a Futureman, a self-described "Galactic Poet" and radical individualist known for his innovative use of Hebrew both on the page and in his performances and films. Recognized by the New York Times as one of the poets that "helped the biblical tongue evolve into a modern, living language," Avidan played in his work with lexical and syntactical innovations, neologisms, various registers of Hebrew throughout its history, and colloquial speech, which he believed deserved its place in poetry. Ever the innovator, in 1974 he even conducted a poetic dialogue with a computer. Futureman, in Tsipi Keller's virtuosic translation, introduces selections from across Avidan's groundbreaking oeuvre to English-language readers for the first time. Scholar Anat Weisman, in her illuminating introduction "David Avidan: The Sadosemantic Poet," provides the literary, social, and cultural background to Avidan's work.

Ksenia Bushka’s The Freedom Factory tells the story of a real-life military factory through monologues collected from anonymized workers, managers, and engineers. Not exactly realism, the novel combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion to transport its reader to the harsh and magnetic factory floor. If the Moth Radio Hour had a special episode to introduce listeners to the mythos, pathos, and yes, bathos of twentieth–century Russia, this would be it. Winner of Russia’s National Bestseller Prize (2014) and essential reading to understand the persistence of the Soviet mindset, The Freedom Factory is a book of paradox, at once recognizable and idealized: a bittersweet recounting of military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure, life stories and love stories.

After a solar flare upended the world order, Kwesi Brackett's life disintegrated. His wife took up with a millionaire in the heavily armed Silicon territories and his daughter's university, Yale, relocated to the Caribbean. After being laid off by NASA, Brackett finds himself in Africa, as one of the head engineers for the newly formed Nigerian Space Program. Suddenly, the NSP's goal of getting astronauts into space is more important than ever. With most of Europe, Asia, and North America knocked off-line, thousands of satellites about to plummet to Earth, and the political minefield that is the rescue of an international group of astronauts trapped on the international station, time is of the essence. The deranged and violent militant group Boko Haram is steadily approaching, and the last surviving members of the Fulani tribe, an ancient matriarchal nomadic society, have found refuge in the abandoned caves of the Saon people. Accessible only by sonic vibrations, the sophisticated cave system contains messages from the past in a series of astrolabes, powerful amulets whose destructive force is harnessed by the Fulani tribeswomen.The astrolabes, it turns out, hold the secret to the Saon people's extinction, and clues about a different flare that rocked Earth thousands of years ago. When a mysterious creature breaks into Brackett's quarters, the engineer is not sure whether it was a rival space program or the government as they race to complete the Naijapool--an anti-gravity simulation to train the Naijanuats. In over his head, Bracket is distracted only by his favorite reality show Mrs. N Fires the Help and his affair with scientist and music enthusiast, Seeta. Increasingly, however, Nigeria's past and present are threatening to collide in a battle over its own future, and Bracket and Seeta seem to be the only ones who suspect it is all connected. Enter Wale Olufunmi, the original protagonist of Nigerians in Space. A former lunar geologist who continues to dream of participating directly in a space mission, Wale lands at the Nigerian Space Program facility, on a private jet. When Brackett, Wale, and Seeta discover the Fulani women's hideout, and the power of the astrolabes, they band together to outmaneuver Boko Haram, save Nigeria from a sinister government conspiracy, and finally launch a spacecraft.

“Even while boasting of its rapid strength and speed,” Kiriu Minashita says in the afterword to Sonic Peace, “the world is being ecstatically eroded by the violent rewriting of meaning.” Sonic Peace is a work of extreme genius and unassailable critique, fused with beauty and lightheartedness: a love story set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic Tokyo.  Published in Japan in 2005, Sonic Peace won the celebrated Chuya Nakahara Prize in 2006, and solidified Minashita's status as one of the most important critical Japanese voices of her generation.

One of The Smithsonian Magazine's Best Science Books of the YearThe future is here and, frankly, it sucks. Without doubt, our culture is at a crossroads. Political strife and economic crises are byproducts of a larger looming challenge, one in which we will have to ask ourselves what constitutes a meaningful life. We must do the hard work of imagining a different kind of reality for ourselves. It's work that anticipates the worst but sees hope on the other side of catastrophe, or at least possibility; that presumes disaster and says, now what?A best-of-the-year anthology, What Future is a collection of long-form journalism and essays published in 2016 that address a wide range of topics crucial to our future, from the environmental and political, to human health and animal rights, to technology and the economy. What Future includes writing from authors Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Vandermeer, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as the scientists, journalists, and philosophers who are proposing the options that lay not just ahead, but beyond, in prestigious magazines and journals such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

Part lambasting of gender roles and capitalist absurdity, part investigation into human-nature relationships, Stormwarning is the third collection of poetry by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir. An up-and-coming poet in Iceland and abroad, Tómasdóttir imbues her work with dark humor and understated Scandinavian dread, playing with language and expectations to leave her reader in breathless anticipation of the coming storm.

Though revered in literary circles, Chinese poet Zhu Zhu remains on the periphery, writing quietly. His work, lucidly rendered by accomplished translator Dong Li, weaves slowly through personal and larger histories to reveal an astute, painterly vision of the world. Selected from an oeuvre spanning 1990 to the present, the poems of The Wild Great Wall animate seeming minutiae and collective memory to interrogate the nature of time and the encounters that occupy it. Tight as a wound rope, they bind to the interiority of the mind and wait to be unraveled.

Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Mario Bellatin’s Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation — a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely, while the novella mutates into another story. Cleverly translated by Jacob Steinberg, this Phoneme Media edition of a new novel by one of Mexico’s most notorious and celebrated writers includes a translator’s afterword and explanatory maps by illustrator Zsu Szkurka.

Night-Sky Checkerboard introduces English-language readers to the understated, imagistic lyricism of a Korean master at the peak of his powers. As a young poet, Oh Sae-young was fascinated by Modernism, and attempted to represent the inner landscapes of the dislocated self produced by industrial society before arriving at more existentialist concerns. The present volume, masterfully translated by Brother Anthony of Taize, reflects Oh Sae-young's harmonious fusion of image with idea, with woodpeckers pecking secret coded messages, the farmer finding the ground's erogenous zones, and a cloud factory on strike.