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Iconic poet-artist of the Swedish post-war avant-garde, Åke Hodell tells the story of his artistic journey through the absurd, satirical, tour-de-force that is The Marathon Poet, originally published in 1981 and now available for the first time in a facsimile-style English translation.

Hodell’s book is centered around a fictional race between poets, in which our author-protagonist becomes the sole qualifier after some fitness and alcohol tests. The narrative of the race is intersected by apocryphal origin stories of Hodell’s earlier works that freely blur fact and fiction, taking us even as far as Hell to find a publisher for one of his books. Through para-fictional devices, repetitive language techniques, phonetic writing, and satirical humor he continuously mocks authority. Hodell’s tall tales unmask and satirize oppression’s many guises—from disciplinary speed reading in elementary school to the forced repetition of a military command. In one chapter, Hodell relates the history of capitalism by way of a multi-vocal sound-poem featuring the voices of European and American automobiles. Through all the tribulations experienced by the marathon poet, Hodell’s pacifist and anarchist politics are always present, always in solidarity, always in resistance.

MA, Ida Börjel’s award-winning abecedarian, is a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene. A refraction of Inger Christensen’s seminal Alphabet, published in 1981, MA speaks a furious incantation in the past tense, a grammar of loss, from the vantage point of a disintegrating here and now. Appearing for the first time in English in Jennifer Hayashida’s luminous translation, MA is less a curative than a testimonial, speaking simultaneously for the one and the many, the solitary mother and the insurgent multitude.

The Hand of the Hand brings us to a future or an alternate universe in which earth, animal, and human intertwine—where stomachs have meadows, milk pours itself over trees, and flies wash the dead. Vazquez pulls deceptively simple, bare language into puzzling formations, creating an ambient unease. By turns lyrical and absurd, The Hand of the Hand explores the mystery and strangeness of what it means to be both speech and body, tongue and dirt.

Gowanus atropolis is an ecopoetical exploration of the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, a recently designated superfund site that was once a fertile fishing ground for the Canarsie Native American tribe. The poems grapple with reconciling the toxicity of the titular Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the east river in ‘Manahatta’ with the poet’s search for the pastoral in New York City. A queer elegy for when language might have been prior to thought, where the phrase becomes the thought, rather than the other way around—so that the dystopic might become, if not utopic, at least measurable / pleasurable, ‘melodious offal.’Gowanus atropolis reinscribes, as always already present, both queer and Native spaces in and around the Gowanus through a radical reshaping of English.

This special edition artist's book contains ledgers and transcriptions documenting the exchanges that occurred at Rob's Word Shop, followed by an essay by the store's Records Manager, Lawrence Giffin, and a sampling of materials collected for the store's archives."On Wednesday, May 5th, 2010, I opened Rob's Word Shop, a storefront shop where individual letters and words were sold. My shop location was 308 Bowery (the south window at the Bowery Poetry Club), and my hours of operation were Tuesday through Thursday 11:00AM—2:00PM, from May 5 through May 27. The words and letters were either chosen by the individual customers or arrived at with my assistance. I would then hand-write or print the letter, word, or phrase. Single letters were sold for 50 cents and single words for one dollar. As the sole proprietor of the store, I invited people to stop by for a chat and shop for words. All of these chats were recorded as videos and can be viewed on YouTube."—Robert Fitterman

In the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century, a person of mixed ethnicity finds herself questing inside old European art and ideas. Terrible as these things often are, she enjoys recalibrating them, and she is optimistic. Aim at the Centaur Stealing your Wife is the first full-length collection of poetry for American writer and art historian Jennifer Nelson.

Publisher’s Weekly has hailed Aim at the Centaur Stealing your Wife “a debut notable for its delightfully volatile free verse, Nelson tumbles back and forth between the slangy, plugged-in anxieties of a post-Great Recession generation and the resources of traditional art history…Nelson’s compositions display the techniques and attitudes of a restless generation.”

Tangling the language of social-scientific investigations of rape, media constructions of perpetrators and victims, and autobiographical memory, distance decay moves through that linguistic (and conceptual) mess via disclosure and even lyric. In attempts to come to literal terms with the experience of rape, the book establishes a play/ground in language for personal, historical emotion through personality theory and affective genealogies.

The pages of Emergency INDEX are open to all who work with performance. In each annual volume, contributors document works made in the previous year. By including performances regardless of their country of origin, genre, aims, or popularity, INDEX reveals the breathtaking variety of practices used in performance work today. Each volume features a comprehensive index of key terms used by contributors in describing and discussing their own work. Begun in 2011, INDEX is a lens for seeing the field of contemporary performance from the ground up.

Hit Parade is a bilingual Russian-English collection of poems by the four leading authors of the Orbita creative collective, based in Riga, Latvia: Semyon Khanin, Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov and Sergej Timofejev. Though their work is primarily written in Russian, the Orbita poets draw on European, Latvian and Russian traditions and contemporary scenes.

Founded in 1999, Orbita has published a series of almanacs of literature and visual art and a number of bilingual Russian-Latvian books of poetry, essays, art and photography, as well as three audio CDs and a collection of videos. Active in multi-media poetry installations for galleries and museums, Orbita has also organized three “Word in Motion” festivals of poetic video and multi-media art in Latvia. Orbita’s projects have been recognized with The Latvian Writer’s Union Annual Literature Award, the Poetry Days Award, the MAP Book Design Award, among others.

Or, The Ambiguities is a book of long poems that asks how we correspond with the dead. Written with and through various works by Herman Melville, the poems in this collection invent new visual forms in order to playfully enact Jack Spicer’s idea that poems are “how we dead men write to each other.”

In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during and after the forever-imminent apocalypse.In channeling and sampling works of apocalyptic fiction and non-fiction - The War of the Worlds, The World Without Us, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and The Road, to name a few - the poems, along with a final essay, explore multiple world-endings and their possible outcomes, and pose answers to the questions: will we, how do we, and should we stay alive?

The fifth and most critically acclaimed volume of poetry by Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão (1943-2003), Algaravias: Echo Chamber takes its title from an entangled history, referenced in an etymological epigraph: “From al-garb, the West; that language of the Arabs considered corrupted, little understood by the Spanish. Also a name of a plant, given that name for the messiness of its branches.” Its ruminations on passage, self-placement, virtual geography, human-electronic interaction, poetic consciousness, and mortality are inflected by Salomão’s dual heritage; they also confront the isolating nature of the dictatorship he lived through as well as the aggressively optimistic discourse of post-dictatorship “modernization” efforts: the torrential influx of mass media and multinational corporations, and the sterile, touristic, and militarized landscapes of modern space and spectacle.

In classical rabbinic literature the unpronounceable name of God produces and sacralizes a host of synonyms around what can’t be said. Residual Synonyms for the Name of God performs the proliferation of language and culture in our late capitalist moment as a residual structure of a religious past. Lewis Freedman has heretically rewritten the work of his ancestors to create an annotated index of this inherited structure, in which our contemporary drive for total finitude profanes the infinite primarily by being indistinguishable from it.

Lewis Freedman is the author of several chapbooks of poetry, including Catfish Po’ Boys, Suffering Exchange Walks With And (both from Minutes Books), and non-symbolic non-symbolic non-symbolic (Same Text). In addition, he has authored several experiments on the form of the book including Solitude: The Complete Games (Troll Thread), a collaboration with Kevin Rydberg that will take several years for your computer to read, and the book within a book, Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well-Greased Press) which interleaves notebook facsimiles with poems on the practice of notebooking. His poems have appeared in Jubilat, Epiphany, Catch-Up, Try, P-Queue, and 6x6, among many others.

Half poems, half prose, Dear Angel of Death braids intimate and public thinking about forms of togetherness. Is one woman a mother, a person in an artworld, a “black”? What imaginary and real spirits are her guides? The title essay proposes disinvestment in the idea of the Music as the highest form of what blackness "is" and includes many forms: philosophical divergence on the problem of folds for black life, a close reading of Nathaniel Mackey's neverending novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, and an impassioned defense-cum-dismissal of contemporary hip hop's convergence with capitalism.

Before Lyricism includes six book-length poems: "The Forest" (1954), "Plant Upbringing" (1956), "Diary of Age" (1958), "Description of the Body" (1959), "The Meaning of the Blind" (1962), and "Our Way of Being in Danger" (1966). Each of these, apart from “Plant Upbringing,” was published as a separate book, which Vakalo herself designed. (“Plant Upbringing” was originally included in the volume Wall Painting, of which Vakalo later repudiated all but this single long poem.) For Vakalo, these poems formed a larger, accretive whole, which she titled Prin Apo Ton Lyrismo (Before Lyricism). By bringing these poems together under a single cover, Before Lyricism allows us to see the complex web of intertextual relations that bind these books together. Meanwhile, by bringing these poems into English, this volume will enrich not only our knowledge of this key period in Vakalo’s career, but English-language readers’ understanding of modern Greek poetry as a whole.Translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich.

"I cannot imagine poetry without her." Bob Holman

The Happy End / All Welcome is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants... At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.

Originally published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara in 1936 by Laura Riding's and Robert Graves's Seizen Press, Convalescent Conversations is one of Riding's least known works, and one of her most idiosyncratic. A novel unfolding almost entirely in dialogue form, Convalescent Conversations tells the story of Adam and Eleanor, two patients recovering from unknown maladies in a nondescript sanitarium. Through a series of increasingly esoteric philosophical conversations regarding topics such as God, love, and the meaning of illness, Adam and Eleanor come to tell the stories of who they are and what ails them. While not strictly an allegorical work, it is difficult to not see historical parallels between the suffering of the protagonists and the state of the world in the late 1930s. 1936 was also the year Riding and Robert Graves had to flee Mallorca, Spain following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Edited and with an introduction by George Fragopoulos.

Lowly is part invocation, part invitation. The poems in this debut collection consider death, rebirth, and love, while exploring the symbols that make life bearable. Here, ancient mythology and philosophy are examined through contemporary situations, brought forth by a voice that oscillates between humorous and plaintive tones—“I invent stories. Out of other stories. I can only repeat what I have heard. // A scruple is the enemy of a moment.” Lowly is a restorative work with rhythmic lines that will resonate with the reader long after the book is closed.

Golem Soveticus: Prigov as Brecht and Warhol in One Persona places Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, one of the most significant poets and artists of the late-Soviet underground, into transnational historical context. Aleksandr Skidan, an award-winning Russian critic and poet, describes Prigov’s “mass production” of poetry and approach to ideology critique as elements of the global transformation of art practices in the late twentieth century.

Gestures is a collection of prose poems connecting seemingly distinct elements, found either in urban space or in the realms of cultural history. Some readers, who had a chance to experience these ghostly constellations their original Latvian, complained that they cast a melancholic spell. Descriptions of landscapes and people pose no consoling effect, instead they function as darkened reflections of complex human emotions, trying to escape metaphysical abstractions. Cadence is there, but lyricism is not its master.

Commodore, Jacqueline Waters’ third poetry collection, is a book about care, both the twoway street of it and the hierarchy created by it. Or it’s about coming very close to your subject, intent on discerning shades of sentiment, full of nostalgia for things you didn’t really enjoy when they happened, concerned care might be an exploitable weakness, even as its cultivation becomes the only way to attract the mercy you will inevitably require…