Scathing and meek, furious and thoughtful, reckless and careful, brave and frightened, Cɶur de Lion is something you've never seen before that you already know by heart.--Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket

A book of frank witty poetry that makes me laugh, cry, throw things.--Lena Dunham

She is in me now like a hot virus and i am smitten.--Melissa Broder

In Cɶur de Lion the erotics of power and powerlessness are not opposites--they flirt and morph and clash into a brilliant blast of poetic energy. I saw Ariana read from this book at UC Berkeley, and the walls of the academy rumbled. I fucking love this book. --Dodie Bellamy

At the time we thought Cɶur de Lion a more comfortable book than The Cow, for it is, after all, a 'love poem' no matter how perverse, but as I look at it again I'm struck by how fierce its valences are, how intransigent its anti-nationalism. Already I think of Reines' work in art as dividing, like Picasso's, into periods, and if this is the rose period it is also the time in which blood rained down on the peoples' heads. Asked for the history of a certain sort of public sex, I mumble that there was Zabriskie Point, and then there was Peter Hujar, and there was Cɶur de Lion. --Kevin Killian

Holiday curates poems-as-text and image-as-impression, lyricism and activism. The legacies of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday and other icons collide, harnessing taboos they upheld triumphantly. Layers of a story coalesce in restricted space producing ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies.

The New Mythology Begins to Love me

With an immediacy that seems at once artless and profoundly sophisticated. You know how Billie Holiday sounds vague and precise like an unmarked grave that might your father's but he had another name for his disappearance, he called it love eventfully shattered with enough of it

I heard black people don't get depressed, besides as luxury, and the bible says. What's popular now is the way the miracle of pure style cures or is it curses, crosses our heart, hopes to hide of what it don't get while new angels sing hexes into bottles of northern comfort. Uproar. Jesus, already these myths are obsolete too and fresh the cold details he was bleeding his twisted love into. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love.

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (2011), won the Motherwell Prize. Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues, a dos-a-dos book featuring poetry, letters and essays, came out in late 2013. Holiday lives in Los Angeles.

Sly, witty, and utterly compelling, Valerie Werder's Thieves illuminates how we create and examine our selves in thrall to late capitalism--and how we're all thieves of one kind or another. This novel gives immense pleasure...

--CLAIRE MESSUD

Valerie Werder's debut novel, Thieves, is an autofictional account of the strivings and humiliations of a gallery girl, also named Valerie. The tale of Valerie's maturation, her life and adventures in sex and crime, exquisitely eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms, and responsibilities.

As the novel begins, Valerie is an art worker in New York CIty, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to cherish objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-aware creature and expert weaver of language in the sales game. Valerie generates scaffolds of empty sales copy and lives in a storm of things, many of which are commodities--including herself. All the while, she becomes increasingly aware of the ways she can acquire and be acquired.

Watch as Valerie falls for the dashing and irresistible master shoplifter, Ted. Follow along as she begins to uncover Ted's shady past and secret lives. Along the way, you will, with Valerie, encounter: bleeding meats suavely tucked into Ted's loose jeans, the strangely seductive language of the highly personalized and persistent emails sent to Valerie from her local bank branch, and Valerie's vivid dreams, including one in which the minds of the women of New York City are uploaded into identical metallic cyborg bodies.

In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, Thieves is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.

Selected for The Fence Modern Prize in Prose

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection.

Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life. Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero's journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.

Poetry. African & African American Studies.

An unforgettable journey through the Cosmos via poetry and flash fiction: naming stars, inventing new worlds, and exalting the Divine. This is where narrative poetry and poetic storytelling meet to form a galaxy of wonder. For fans of science fiction, flash fiction, poetry, story in verse, and all things outer space. While the Morning Stars Sang Together blends lyrical beauty, theology, philosophy, whimsy, and the contemplation of the deep and wide, the small and the hidden.

Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form - a continuation of the project begun in On the Nameways and Alien Tatters - is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation - as many as 10 sonnets in a single day - marries the stunning variety of his intellect, on the mountaintop of formal inquiry.

LIBRARY OF HAY

So slow death oft the onyx dolls

each in its own lab colors rollicking encores

who's there? do you want your museum

room infiltrated? only the singing parts

terrible loss of air raid powder

entanglements poled on kapok

the last to be heard? this ploy of dolls

irradiated heads and curls of coffin wood

death is always plural here? stolid

anyway someway still enters the frontway

through the water door to Manikin Lake

the throttles held down there you went to

hair school against my wisdom thus the

remnants spelled out there then coded there

ARCANE HEMISPHERES

Something is wrong with the literature of this blood

maybe a tool baron? help must be brought

to light this legend take the taxis away

clear the blocks I will have all flesh riven

gestural lengths of shadow and echo bulk

the Armbruster is the name of the monster this time

but I don't anymore take it that anything!

the vestibules beyond the outer rooms will tell the tale

Uncle Cecropio you may dust my broom

palest crystal master what is dead must remain

beyond the alternate fleshlike regions let it go

Artoo will find us out heard a cry in the mirror

located in the funnies but so graceless in class

the whole night shines a brass hole in my tongue

Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room.--Joyelle McSweeney

His name is a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language.

Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger.-Arielle Greenberg

Her poems take some getting used to.-Robert Strong

Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...-Cole Swensen

Preface 1

People say nothing new or the death of the author but, I am new and I am not dead.

Intellectual, anachronistic, superserious: I'm not going to start crying because experimental and I'm not going to start crying because not experimental...

I just want to piss down my own leg...

And should everyone be bored like narcosis?....

Poetry should be uh huh like...baby has to have it...

If anyone thinks they need to write reviews, teach classes, edit magazines, or translate

books in order to write good poetry...then maybe they should just take a rest from it...

If you try to write a good poem again and again for years and years and receive no awards, no money, no nothing...then you're happy...

And all these blurbs are for s-. Like if I were to carry around a turd and pretend it is my baby...

The poet I worship is Edward Dorn, because I adore his disgust...

Whatever he says feels like art...

Poetry is for crap since there's no money or fast cars in it...

But, in the thighs...I feel it...

Douglas Kearney's innovative new collection makes me tremble like a 'mouth and mind full of fish hooks.' . . . These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before.--Terrance Hayes

In the Laurels, Caught is a collection of lighthearted, deep-rooted poems written around the Appalachian region of North Carolina in Madison County. An adventurous, intellectually restless native, Lee Ann Brown writes out of attachment but with the slant of a transplanted outsider. She investigates elements of local language, musicality, material culture, and landscape, using collage, found poetry, and oral history and anecdote.

A Daylily's blossom
only lasts one day

Binnorie O Binorie O

My grandmother showed me
how to have my say

O the glory O the glory

Now every time I see a faded drooping bud

I deadhead it like she did so the rest can live on

The story O the story

Lee Ann Brown is professor of English at St. John's University. Her book Polyverse won the New American Poetry Series Award. The Sleep That Changed Everything appeared in 2003. She is founding editor of the small press Tender Buttons.

[Douglas Kearney] is at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place.--The Los Angeles Times

Dynamic poet, performer, librettist, and professor Douglas Kearney's works speak to those who are listening to what our living, material language has to say about race and history. At the hub of Buck Studies is a long mash-up of the stories of Herakles, the Greek bad-man, and that of Stagger Lee, the black bad-man. Stagger Put Work In examines the Twelve Labors Herakles performed to atone for murdering his family through Stagger Lee's murder of black man Billy Lyons. What is enacted by this appropriation is an exhaustion of forms--gangsta rap and its antecedent, the murder ballad.

only good one dead one we scold our mirror. should've been dead
before Stagger wrassled it bull-headed red-blind muscle-a-muscle.
bully and bull stagger the city levee round round round.

Douglas Kearney resides in Altadena, California, and teaches at California College for the Arts. His degrees are from Howard University and California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of three previous poetry collections; his work appears in many anthologies including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature. His honors include a Cave Canem fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and commissions from Minneapolis's Weisman Art Museum and New York's Studio Museum.

In a world teetering on the brink of collapse, Derrick Mac MacDonald believes he has escaped his dark past. But when a relentless storm, a haunting nightmare, and a mysterious visitor collide, Mac is pulled back into a world of hidden truths, ancient powers, and impossible choices. As Earth hurtles toward an impending cataclysm, the survival of humanity hangs in the balance, and Mac's role in the crisis is far more crucial than he ever imagined. With danger closing in from all sides-both within and beyond the stars-Mac must confront the wolves that lurk in his soul and his past. Will he rise to the challenge, or will the weight of his broken legacy and his family's fragile future tear him apart?