The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap's flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems' action in time and space. They shadow the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, the US proxy wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Soviet collapse--not as history but as the camouflage-pattern of then and to come which form the flickering and very real habitus of the present.

A ground breaking anthology that collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists, A Mouth Holds Many Things is the first book of its kind.

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance--and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson's powerful memoir, Low--selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions' inaugural essay contest--tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, Low's provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator--while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Animate, emotive, sensory-rich and a little vicious, the poems in this collection take as their subject the earth as a planet, small and contaminated and alone in vast space, and the humans and creatures and technology swarming it with life. Formally inventive and playful with language, referencing Tennyson in one breath and the metaverse the next, these poems wander through spacetime with their irreverent theologies, exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate and awake in this weird moment of historical time, a mixture half of awe and half of madness.

Jaime Gil de Biedma is the most original and influential among the poets known as the '50's Generation in Spain, and is considered the greatest Spanish poet to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. His life and literary career were bracketed almost entirely by the rise and fall of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, notorious for the suppression of literature. Born in 1929, he was six years old when García Lorca was murdered in Granada at the outbreak if the Civil War, and his collected poems, Las personas del verbo, first appeared in 1975, the year Franco died. What is surprising is that Gil de Biedma was a leftist, homosexual poet from the Catalan capitol, Barcelona - all of Franco's favorite things - who not only published books of autobiographical poetry in Spain but was known as a poet of social conscience as well as erotic lyricism. Like other Spanish poets of his time, he chose his words carefully.

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new characters are incorporated from the news and from the poet's life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author's book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume's ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

Ahmad Almallah's third collection considers the impossible task of being a Palestinian in the world today.

When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong? In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, Celan among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.

In their hybrid debut collection Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.

Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.

The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A Whale is a Country explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.

The followup to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. A child surprised that a neon sign / isn't hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one's goals states the speaker of Youth Is A Fugitive and this sentiment is one of the central precepts of Returning the Sword to the Stone. Congealing directly off the page, these are poems that only Mark Leidner could have written.

Early Works collects Alice Notley's first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

CATARACT begins in the desert, climaxes in fleeing wildfires, and ends in an OSHA conference call. From winery workers dying in the fields to endangered desert tortoises unable to outrun the flames, CATARACT is a venting of ecological rage, a communal cry in many voices against the few who keep us in this situation by using power to perpetuate inaction.

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance--and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson's powerful memoir, Low--selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions' inaugural essay contest--tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, Low's provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator--while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Home Movies is an essay about the day-to-day realities and unrealities of its author's hypermediated consumer life as a teacher and parent in Orlando, Florida. In each of the essay's seven sections, Wheaton explores his relationships to new media and old tech, and the people around him, with thoughtful ambivalence and humor. Altogether, the various threads of Home Movies--image, tangibility, fame, nostalgia, simulation, marijuana, and cinema history--pull together into a moving attempt to accept the tensions between watching/being watched and life/art.

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening. What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US's brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O'Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the war on terror, feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

Instrument is an experiment in multimodal poetics--inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist's three forms of voice. Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom's life and work speaks to fragmentation--of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places--yet within this configuring lies her art's fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography and gripping, restless poetry, Instrument represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler's Ode, of ambient and folk-tinged songs featuring ethereal assemblages of sung-poetry, vocal layering, spare guitar, piano, and field recordings. Traveler's Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and Antiquated Future.

These twenty-seven poems of Dead Winter continue the poet's ongoing From a Winter Notebook cycle which plays on traditional winter themes of stasis, ruin, aging, lost love, belatedness, dormancy, and decline. Aggressively personal, by turns ironic and sentimental, mixing colloquial and archly artificial diction, rife with quotations and reference to a wide variety of lyric traditions, these poems stage a polyphonic and ambivalent internal dialog that vacillates between the often-contradictory desires of social justice and personal freedom. Straining to resist impending erosion in the political tide, the singular voice seeks to hold these contradictions up to the light and to contemplate their prismatic refractions without resolution. Caught between complicity and antagonism, between the impending obsolescence of inherited poetic traditions and a desire to commune with the contemporary, the voice churns on--miming winter's monotony--to carve out a space for melancholic complaint and anxious meditation on the end-times endeavor of the lyric mode itself. Through representations of desire and melancholy in a technologically invasive era, these poems also ask about the effect of technological and political shifts on the bounds of the personal, and of the way a techno-oriented sociality impinges on interpersonal relationships, the interior dialogs of the self, and the writing of poetry.

A ground breaking anthology that collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists, A Mouth Holds Many Things is the first book of its kind.

In A TEN PESO BURIAL FOR WHICH TRUTH I SIGN, debut poet Gabriel Palacios slipstreams through a hauntological, historicized Southwest, to make sense out of the life inherited. Episodes of modern decay, violence and indignity co-mingle with the colonial horrors sometimes visited upon, and often committed by the ancestors of the author, who traveled from Basque Spain to the Southwestern border region in the Eighteenth-century. These are poems that reckon with complicity: historic and on the streets of South Tucson, Arizona in the present. This collection represents a prism through which we assess time, place, and the specters of one's own conduct and circumstances.

The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap's flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems' action in time and space. They shadow the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, the US proxy wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Soviet collapse--not as history but as the camouflage-pattern of then and to come which form the flickering and very real habitus of the present.