The Song Cave – förlag

“A warm celebration of creativity and the writing life.” —Kirkus Reviews

Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm, the nation's premier literary radio program, has been bringing writers and readers together in close company for more than three decades. Audiences around the world tune in each week to discover new ways of thinking about books through Silverblatt's compassionate and enthusiastic conversations with contemporary writers, compelled by the surprising range of ideas and feelings that only his legendary close readings can evoke. Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt gathers interviews with some of the most influential luminaries of our time: John Ashbery, John Berger, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, William H. Gass, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag and David Foster Wallace (who notably said to Silverblatt in their first of several conversations, "I feel like I wanna ask you to adopt me.").Gathered together for the first time in print, these conversations span years, revealing not only the quality and character of the writers, but also the special relationship that Silverblatt developed with them during their lifetimes. This collection reveals why so many consider Silverblatt to be our greatest reader, as he allows us to see these writers at their most animated and understood.Michael Silverblatt (born 1952) is the host of KCRW’s Bookworm and also regularly hosts literary conversations for Lannan Foundation's “Readings and Conversations” series in Santa Fe. In 2018, he was the inaugural recipient of A Public Space's Deborah Pease Prize, awarded to a figure who has advanced the art of literature.

“Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent in American English.” —Ron Silliman

Though Alfred Starr Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s; in two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and in one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton's poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton's poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks.Alfred Starr Hamilton (1914–2005) was an American poet from Montclair, New Jersey. His publications include the chapbooks Sphinx, The Big Parade and the full-length collection The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.

“The poems scorn and celebrate—with equal gusto—feelings and attitudes that shift, deepen and advise.” —Prageeta Sharma

Smudgy and Lossy, the first collection of poetry by Idaho–based poet John Myers, offers us a map to a borderless and psychedelically rural landscape—poems begin and end without notice, and the titular characters, Smudgy and Lossy, fade in and out of the rustic settings, situations, and daily chores that Myers assigns to them, “look[ing] for delicate flowers that bloom through hard sand or clay.” With an expansive and textured queerness covering each page, the flat horizons of these poems sit too far away to navigate their identity with any certainty. Building continuously toward the collection's final swirling 13 pages, a 127-line list poem leaves us with one of the most exciting and bewildering poetic finales in recent memory.John Myers grew up in the Endless Mountains and now lives in Moscow, Idaho. John's work has appered in Aufgabe, Denver Quaterly, Lungfull, Fence and Pank.

The first-ever English translation of one of Norway's best-known poets

From one of Norway's most outstanding living poets, Helge Torvund's Seriously Well is a book-length poem that explores the characteristics and limits of poetic incantation in relation to memory and illness. With spare lines and simple language, Torvund layers intimate recollections of nature, childhood, a personal illness and ultimately his deeply affecting acceptance of death. But Seriously Well is not a poem of mourning; rather it is one of expectation, experience, and of "a confidence that told me / the very best thing to do for me / was to be where I am, / be alive / in that which is." Translated from Norwegian by its author, Seriously Well is the first full-length book of Torvund's poetry to appear in English.Helge Torvund was born in Ha, Norway, in 1951, and lives with his wife near the Southwest coast. He has pub­lished over two dozen collections of poetry, along with children's books, essays and translations. In 2018 he was awarded the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy. His children's book Vivaldi (NYRB, 2019) was included in Flavorwire's 20 Most Beautiful Children's Books of All Time.

“With language crispy, sharp, focused and forgiving, Rucker pulls us into the creation and destruction of what can be revealed when we hold our truths to sunlight and midnight’s dark. This debut is resplendent ... Dereliction brought me to tears.” —Joseliah Rebekah Hughes

Dereliction, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker's debut collection of poetry, moves through childhood and into the afterlife with poems that evoke an artful and urgent sense of the author's “insatiable wandering.” With cinematic imagery and formal variation, these poems effortlessly find dream-life and myth transforming the daily actions of talking on the phone or finding your reflection in the window. The bracing intimacy of Rucker's voice invites us into a precise and carefully constructed world in which we are asked to question what it means to “do the human things,” and where the poet eventually asks the reader, and possibly poetry itself, “What bloody lens holds firm between this mystery & us?”Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a self-taught writer and poetic practitioner from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in various media and publications, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Annulet, Montez Press Radio and more.

“Nicholson tarries with what remains of the ancient lineaments—discipline, devotion, works of corporal mercy—perhaps still seeking what Dante was after: the scraps that fall from the plates of the angels.” —David Brazil, Colorado Review

Deadpan, heartfelt and everything in between, Sara Nicholson poetry is a reluctant mystic who can both make us laugh and point us toward magical truths within a single poem. Her third collection of poems, April, is filled with the perverse and the sacred, whether the subject is art, love or sex, or whether it is ancient or contemporary. Nicholson's interests are timeless, and by the end of April, the reader may be convinced that they've brushed up against a somewhat strange and singular poet who is inventing a new way of seeing specifically for them.Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, both from The Song Cave. She lives in Boise, Idaho.

“Once again, we encounter Notley as one the great interlocutors of the world, a dedicated advocate for what is between and beyond definition.” —Tess Michaelson, Full Stop

Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of discussions over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s she lived a traveling poet’s life before settling on New York’s Lower East Side. For 16 years there, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School. Notley is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère and How Spring Comes, which was a co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. In 1998, Penguin published Mysteries of Small Houses, which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. In 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

“Laforgue is exuberantly translated and contextualized by poet and academic Ford ... [His] vivid imagery and wild energy should not be missed.” —Publishers Weekly

Largely unread yet one of the most influential forces on modern literature, Jules Laforgue was a brilliant French poet whose work was cut short by his untimely death at 27 years old. Praised by Pound as “a father of light,” Laforgue has been overshadowed by the many poets he influenced—from Apollinaire to Prévert, Eliot to Joyce—until now. In this bilingual edition, Lunar Solo: Selected Poems, acclaimed poet and translator Mark Ford achieves in English the playful, wild and entertaining style of Laforgue's poetry. Generally acknowledged as the inventor of free verse, Laforgue is part-symbolist, part-impressionist and wholly unique.Jules Laforgue (1860–87) was born to French parents in Montevideo, Uruguay. Following the outbreak of war between Uruguay and Paraguay in 1866, he was sent to school in Tarbes in the southwest of France. Almost all of Laforgue’s poetry was written while he was employed as French Reader to the Empress Augusta at the Imperial Court of Prussia from 1881 to 1886. During his lifetime he published only two volumes of poetry, Les Complaintes (1885) and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886). Generally acknowledged as the inventor of vers libre or free verse, Laforgue has proved enormously influential on many writers, in particular on the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

“A funny and surprising interaction with dailiness, including our phones—the hardware and the relationships maintained through them—and whatever else is still tactile.” —Maddie Crum, Vulture

Stranger, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences—from the mundane to the profound. Whether it's her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th-century political speeches, dizzying corporate communication or emails from her schizophrenic brother, the exact details and use of language in these poems become almost elemental, making an urgent record of the present. Stranger blurs the boundary between life and art—“The things that happened / bled into the language we exchanged.”—with the crystalline touch and nuance of a truly gifted writer.Emily Hunt is the author of the poetry collection Dark Green and the chapbook Company. She has also published two artist's books: Cousins, a collection of photo prints, and This Always Happens, a series of drawings and short texts. She lives in New York.

A unique debut poetry collection by an up-and-coming New York author, including fictional artist statements and proposals for performance projects

Morgan Võ’s fascinating and highly original debut, The Selkie, is organized into three linked sections, animated by jokes, confusion, existential horror and banality. In an outdoor market, we meet an unlikely hero in The Monger, buying and selling fish from his stall while the poems around him touch on topics of racial capitalism, cultural ties to animals and food, dislocation, diaspora and the impacts of the nuclear family. Also included are The Monger’s own written documents that propose a series of year-long performance pieces, each seemingly created to test and explore his specific individuality among a community of displaced histories. Võ investigates how the shadows of larger global issues link with our intimate and daily interactions. The Selkie introduces an entirely unique voice within the landscape of contemporary American poetry.Morgan Võ (born 1989) is a poet and librarian, and a current member of the Poetry Project Newsletter editorial collective. His poems have most recently appeared in the Brooklyn Rail and Wyrm. Originally from coastal Virginia, he lives now in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

The eagerly awaited second collection of tender, considerate poems by The Song Cave editor Alan Felsenthal

Six years ago, Alan Felsenthal’s Lowly was heralded in the Boston Review for its “dreamlike fables and quasi-parables … [a] striking debut collection [that] bypasses many of contemporary poetry’s usual movements, feints and sources.” Now, Felsenthal’s poignant second collection of poems, Hereafter, moves between the difficult work of mourning and the spirited nature of life. Both an elegy for a dear friend and a search for signs of renewal, these poems recover pastoral symbols of sorrow from cliché. Essential in their attempt at consolation, Felsenthal's requiems traverse landscapes—the ocean, the earth and the moon—using both humor and pathos to awaken the depths of feeling that follow loss.Alan Felsenthal is the author of Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He currently serves as the head of The Song Cave. His writing has appeared in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He teaches poetry at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

“This is the work of a unique poet… I wish that I had written some of these wonderful poems myself.” —Maged Zaher

The poems in Zan de Parry’s debut collection, Cold Dogs, teeter between deadpan humor and heartbreak, producing a new homegrown surrealism. Coupled with the poet's deceptively simple line drawings, these questioning and conversational poems operate on the sidelines of reason, dictated by human instinct. For readers familiar with the poems of Richard Brautigan and James Tate, Parry similarly travels in the bizarre, absurd, and existential, populating his poems with brilliant moments of heartfelt reverie and amusement. The matter-of-factness of the world perceived in Cold Dogs introduces a compelling and exciting sensibility to contemporary poetry.Zan de Parry lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and is a road dog for a tractor auction based out of southern Illinois. He has published multiple chapbooks including Vibraphone (Brest Press), Hennie (Tabloid Presse) and History, Memory, Love, America, Syllogism (Amateur Press). He also runs Keith LLC with his brother Matthew Hodges, with whom he co-authored the full-length Austerity Brunch (Keith LLC). Cold Dogs is his first full-length book of poems.

“What beautiful lucidity these poems have, what quiet, firm intelligence. Margaret Ross’ poetry has the vivid characterizations and scenic quality of stories, but with another more mysterious quality that is disturbing and ineffably moving.” —Mary Gaitskill

Margaret Ross’ highly anticipated second collection of poems, Saturday, chronicles a brute education in love and decorum through ceremony starter kits, basement classrooms and a mission school turned art camp, seeking to “touch the myth beneath the fiction.” Dexterous and musical, Ross writes stunning lines with unmistakable precision. These poems accrue from fleeting details, think in images and resist simplifying the nature of feeling. In emotionally raw scenes, Saturday explores various forms of intimacy and estrangement in unforgettable ways.Margaret Ross is the author of one previous collection, A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Granta, the Paris Review, Poetry, the Yale Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright grant and a Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, she was most recently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and will teach poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall.

This collection marks the long overdue introduction of a major Latin American poet to English-language readers

Acclaimed Argentinian poet Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems animates the particulars of an imaginary world that lives deeply inside our real one, tapping into poetry’s distinctive ability to magically transform daily scenes into purely ecstatic visions. A lonely winter day, the methods of lighting a cigarette, a gentle rain, a naked woman asleep in a field—whether the world of Iannamico's poems is wide awake or asleep (or sometimes both), she softly imbues a dreamlike quality into every line. Masterfully translated by Alexis Almeida, Many Poems is Iannamico's first full-length book to be published in English.Roberta Iannamico lives in Villa Ventana, Argentina. She has published several books of poetry, including El zorro gris, El zorro blanco, Mamuskhas, El collar de fideos, Tendal and several books for children. Her poems have been translated into English and Portuguese.Alexis Almeida is the author of the chapbooks Things I Have Made a Fiction (2024, winner of the Oversound chapbook contest) and I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Ducking Presse 2018). Her first full-length book, Caetano, is forthcoming in 2025 with The Elephants. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and edits 18 Owls Press.

"These poems are stitched with lush, unforeseen textures and unexhausted time. …They make the ghost of John Keats smile in ecstasy. Raymond Roussel would have kept this collection under his pillow." —Lucy Ives

Emily Skillings’ highly anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry's shining stars of humor, insight and edge. It follows her first collection, Fort Not, published by the Song Cave in 2017, which Publishers Weekly called a "fabulously eccentric, hypnotic and hypervigilant debut." Skillings writes through various poetic forms. Featuring a ballet in four acts—"part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal"—addresses to past loves—"I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open"—and an unconventional treatise on education, Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.Emily Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her recent work has been featured in Harper’s, Poetry, Granta and the New York Review of Books.

Inspired by the traditional Korean sijo, David Seung’s first poetry collection reflects on the country’s struggle for independence and his own family’s sacrifices in achieving it

The debut book of poems by David Seung, Silkworm's Pansori is a collection of English-language sijo poems: a traditional Korean poetic form that is straightforward in its syntax but emotionally nuanced. Following this historical form closely, these are poems of elegance and subtlety, like painted still lifes imbued with heartbreaking subtlety and metaphor. Yet the poet can only get so far with this exercise before his own personal Korean history, a family legacy of war and torture, starts creeping in to shatter the otherwise poetic calm. Inserted toward the end of the book is the Korean Declaration of Independence; among the signers is the poet's great-great-grandfather. Asking the reader to contextualize this document with the history of sijo and his own family saga, Seung gracefully addresses generations of anger and pain, and reflects on the intricacies of human existence.David Seung is a Korean American stand-up comedian and writer. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University, where he now teaches.

The fourth collection from a rising star of contemporary American poetry

Hannah Brooks-Motl’s fourth collection of poems is an expansive record of time and thought, weaving together philosophy, science, theology, dreams, grief, literary theory, criticism, history and ideas of utopia—making for a book that continuously surprises and is nearly impossible to categorize. Engaging with centuries of poetic tradition, Ultraviolet of the Genuine leaves room for the development of everything, abstract and alive, even giving ants the spotlight in one long poem. These poems propose a new metaphysics, weighing everyday moments wherein the elusive and ultraviolet radiate. Again, Brooks-Motl challenges the ways we read poetry, not by opting for either the head or the heart, but by choosing both.Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015) and Earth (2019). In a review of Earth in Adroit Journal, Jonathan Suhr writes that in this collection, "The self becomes a referential object defined by its relations to definitions that are also always changing: society, home, family, poetry, memory." Brooks-Motl's poems and essays have appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Cambridge Literary Review, Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity and Tupelo Quarterly.

Follain captures the destruction of both earth and society with his heartbreaking, sparse verses evocative of Reverdy and Apollinaire

Highly regarded yet little known, the work of French poet Jean Follian (1903–71) evokes a specific consciousness, with intense affection for the world around it, surveying the landscape and its species, yet intimate with the most minute particulars. Follain was of that generation who watched the men and animal-powered conveyances of his rural childhood go off to World War I, most never to return. The embers of that agrarian world were further extinguished by increasing industrialization and another global war. "There are almost no more horses," Follain wrote in 1960. In this new volume, Follain's poems feel timely, as the ravages of our human-centric worldview upon plants and animals mount toward irreversibility, and as war unfolds where it has so many times before. Arranged chronologically, Earthly, artfully translated by Andrew Seguin, favors work that has not previously been translated into English, and includes a number of prose poems from Tout Instant, making this the first volume in English to offer poems from all of Follain's books.

Interspersed with ambient sound, lighting and stage directions, Henry-Smith's poems read as an improvised performance fusing the literal and metaphorical

S*an D. Henry-Smith's second full-length book of poems, Paces the Cage, lifts off from their previous book by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith's personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are remixed in real time. Henry-Smith's occasional inclusion of ambient sounds, stage directions, lighting cues and an environmentally musical language helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative experience by this adventurous and endlessly exciting poet. The spontaneous shifts in tone, style and subject matter offer a mirror to personal and historical narratives of oppression, adversity, the act of speaking and what it means to be truly heard by your community of fellow creators.S*an D. Henry-Smith (born 1992) is a poet and photographer. Their first poetry collection, Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. They are also the author of two chapbooks.

With the original remaining copies destroyed in a 1982 arson fire at the Fag Rag/Good Gay Poets offices, a beloved cult classic returns to print for the first time in five decades

Already known as a "poet's poet," John Wieners (1934–2002) moved to Boston's Beacon Hill in 1972, where he was involved with anti-war and gay liberation movements and organizations devoted to the rights of people with mental health conditions. Out of this milieu emerged Behind the State Capitol, described by its author as "Cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights." It is the record of a poet whose life has been shattered by poverty, drug addiction and mental illness. Wieners creates a complex schizo-analysis of language, capitalism, incarceration and state power, while reflecting on unpopular themes of aging and loneliness in the gay world.Considered by many to be his poetical masterpiece, the book was met variously with indifference and outrage when it was published in 1975. In 1982, most remaining copies of the book were destroyed in the Fag Rag/Good Gay Poets arson. Available in print for the first time in 50 years, this revitalized edition contains new afterwords by Wieners' friend James Dunn and the poet's biographer Robert Dewhurst.

Whitmore's semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy and his uncle is a provocative yet essential narrative of queer repression in postwar America

First published in 1987 by Grove Press and long out of print, Nebraska is a classic underground novel by the gay writer and activist George Whitmore. Craig Mullen, a young boy in Nebraska, gets hit by a car on the way to buy groceries. After having his leg amputated, he is bedridden, lonely, bored and addicted to painkillers. His rare interactions with kids his own age, specifically with a neighbor boy who often spends the night, awaken his feelings to further explore. When Craig's uncle moves into the family home, a world of hope, pain, mystery and despair descends upon the Mullen family, giving the reader glimpses into how gay lives were secretly lived and horrifically extinguished in 1950s rural America. With an unforeseen ending that can only be described with the delicately complicated touch of Whitmore's enigmatic prose, Nebraska will stay in your mind long after finishing it.George Whitmore (1945–89) was an American playwright, novelist and poet. He was a member of a literary group known as the Violet Quill, whose seven authors are regarded as the strongest voices of the gay male experience in the post-Stonewall era.