'Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien' brilliantly expands the conversation on undocumented migration by tracing the legacy of illegality. Claiming 'every crossing becomes mine, ' Alan Pelaez Lopez, as fugitive alien, bravely takes on the task of traveling across galaxies to reach an elsewhere that is something more like a new holding. Against the failure of political language, this book of multimedia poems becomes a verb, an active imagining that takes the banality of papers and transforms it into poetry. This intergalactic traveling brings the 'Black NDN' migrant touchingly back to their mother's arms, and to her vision for life. If illegality is to be their legacy, Alan reimagines that illegality as both disruptive of settler-futures and productive for black and indigenous futures. We should be immensely grateful for this vision.

--Javier O. Huerta, author of 'American Copia: An Immigrant Epic'

This is a stunning book. It's history, it's their story, it's an archive and a hard drive with a playful vibe. Its sense of humor girds and grounds and gallops around the gravity of law and belonging and erasure and choosing words and narratives and modes that were made without people like us in the room. It revels in colonial language as it tells that language to sit the f down. There's a new b on the scene. Take note and pay your respects.

--Tommy Pico, author of 'Feed'

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Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is an experimental poetry collection that renders an intimate portrait of growing up undocumented in the United States. Through the use of collages, photographs, emails, and immigration forms, Alan Pelaez Lopez formulates theories of fugitivity that position the Trans*Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. Although themes of isolation and unbelonging are at the forefront of the book, the poet doesn't see belonging to U.S. society as a liberatory practice. Instead, Pelaez Lopez urges readers to question their inheritance and acceptance of settler rage, settler fear, and settler citizenship, so that they can actively address their participation in everyday violences that often go unnoticed. As the title invokes, Intergalactic Travels breaks open a new galaxy where artists of color are the warriors that manifest the change that is needed not only to survive, but thrive.

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Excerpts appear at:

Pittsburgh Poetry Review

Vinyl Poetry

Gemstone Readings

Bozalta

A Quiet Courage

Ashna Ali's poetic memoir The Relativity of Living Well documents the experience of surviving infection with COVID-19 the period of quarantine between March and July 2020 as a queer immigrant of color public school teacher in New York City. These poems bear witness, holler rallying cries, and interrogate the roles, capacities, and needs of the individual within larger social fabrics afflicted by both pandemic and by imperialist capitalist logics of exploitation. These are poems of critique, of grief, and of the darkly absurd quotidian we have normalized in the face of structural failure.

2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Finalist. JP Howard's debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940's and 1950's) with snapshots from the poet's own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother's modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a model mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother's overlapping lives unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970's and 80's: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter's eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein.

JP Howard's collection of poems is a raw reminder of the experience of motherhood and daughterhood. Her sharp memories of love and neglect; elegance, admiration and inadequacy leave a salty/sweet taste not soon forgotten. Jewelle Gomez

Juliet P. Howard's porcelain collection of daughter memoirs is enough to break into you like fine China the shadow of her legacy hovering just above diva, the tenderness of grief stained just below doll. Anastacia Tolbert

Praise Juliet Howard for the wonderful ability to bring to life a mother whose beauty, seduction and danger challenge the notions of a young girl growing up in her shadow. SAY/MIRROR manages to capture with sharp detail and lively resonant language the elegance and ambivalence of the poet's mother and her world. These poems evoke images of passion and loss, pain and joy. We must all stand up and applaud the poem 'pushing her way to the surface... her shape on the page as she unfolds.' Pamela L. Laskin

JP Howard stands out both for her fine poetry and for her passionate, unrelenting involvement with and on behalf of lesbians of color, all lesbians, and the LGBTQ literary community. She reverently celebrates our forebears. A poet, a teacher, and a curator, Ms. Howard has shown an ongoing commitment to nurturing our writers and to writing and publishing from her heart. Lambda Literary Award judges Reginald Harris and Lee Lynch

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to mourn, to protest, to wish for peace and to fight for justice - an OS [re: con]versation with JP Howard

Poetry is rightly destroyed and rebuilt in the abrasive caress of we whose claims upon the human, having constantly been denied by man, put the human to the test. It's still held by many to be a scientific fact that the humanities are not for us. At the same time, surrounding that dimensionless enclosure, whose inside and outside we refuse, we are the humanities, that fleshly mechanics, and LOVE, ROBOT is a missive from that ongoing refusal. 'I know it hurts. But/code fails' so beautifully in Margaret Rhee's hand and ear. 'The world was not made for love, ' she says. So let's follow her on out of it. -Fred Moten

The poems of LOVE, ROBOT are delicate and smooth, witty and touching, and yes, occasionally odd and strange, as human beings themselves are. In a paradoxical and wonderful way, Margaret Rhee's robot love affairs make us rethink what it might mean to be human. -Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Margaret Rhee's LOVE, ROBOT is a gorgeous, brainy collection of poems about erotic connections between humans and machines and the impossibility of disentangling the one from the other. Love machines thrum through these poems, all lit up with desire and electric light, showing 'how to make a circuit.' LOVE, ROBOT resonates with works of great science fiction such as Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, but offers something different, rare, and beautiful in its piercing lyricism and keen, surprising pleasures. -Shelley Streeby author of Radical Sensations and the Director of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop

....As Rhee writes: 'I loved you but/you could not make us beautiful./ I loved you because you could make beautiful things/that I never got to keep.' This way of calling out to a beloved, with whom a reciprocal feeling or encounter is never certain, reminded me - not in its form, but in its feeling - of the Mira Bai's bhajans. Has Margaret Rhee written the world's first cyberbhajan? '[S]ay, robot, ' the book ends: 'murmur to me, it is the middle of the night./....we all deserve a song that is untranslatable'. How beautiful, how ultra-real: I found this sentiment, this voltage, this unspeakable song: to be. -Bhanu Kapil

A collection of love poetry that undercuts and reassembles narratives, LOVE, ROBOT is an experimental text that humanizes our relationship with technology. Through liaisons between humans and machines in a science fictional world, the collection offers a tense, playful, yet complex portrait of love, reflective of our contemporary moment. Rhee draws from a wide array of forms from poetics and robotics such as algorithms, narrative poetry, chat scripts, and failed sonnets to create a world of transgressive love. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love.

Hypermobilities is a verse-memoir in haiku, written over two years of intense engagement with the medical system. Samuels composed these poems in her head while strapped down within MRI machines, in the infusion center with IV needles snaking her arms, waiting and waiting in white-walled rooms. They are necessarily short, to be written by memory without pen or screen. A selection of these poems eventually formed into this collection, named after the hallmark sign of her genetic condition: joint hypermobility.

This book is evidence of unusually ebullient thinking about the spongy and interbred archives of petropolitics & necropolitics--life and death produced for/from the manna of fossil fuels--which Tierney parses, imbricates, and translates into poems that are wet and living, petrified and stony, made of paper and people, just like the range of archives she plumbs....This is a work of remarkable insight, confident tonal variance, and playful intelligence. - Divya Victor, author of Kith

This haunting and profound collection explores the traces of petroleum refineries, factories, landfills, train stations, nuclear power plants, and other sacrifice zones in the United States, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the Pacific Islands. Throughout, Tierney creates an archive of oily verse, cut-up essays, textual collage, and actual polaroids to capture the elastic entanglements between 'humans' and the 'planet, ' between 'carbonauts' and the 'plastisphere.' As companion readers, we are guided into the troubling 'Urf' and urged to discuss: Can poetry help us navigate unseen ecologies? Can poetry become a carbon sink? Can poetry metabolize the world so that we can continue to grow and love with 'concussive tenderness'? --Craig Santos Perez

a year of misreading the wildcats follows intrepid petronaut Orchid Tierney as she painstakingly assembles a nonce archive of the 'waste natures that coagulate' at the watery peripheries of northeastern U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Camden, and Boston. What moves me most about these 'carbifereous lamentations of plastimodernity' is that Tierney's docunaut is no impartial archon, but rather a deeply intricated, implicated, and impassioned environmental advocate and cultural critic. Knowing that the poetics I have imagined are not sustainable, not extreme enough to handle the carbon in the atmosphere or the plastic in the oceans, ' she asks the most difficult question facing us at this historical moment: what does it mean 'to know our extinction, and do it anyway'? In place of an answer, this book offers a stance, a way of relating to the great acceleration of waste with which we're all complicit: 'in such traces, I lung with ash, /ambulate with love and venom.' --Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days

Excerpts / previous versions appear at Radioactive Moat and Pacifica Review:

wildcat: a boring, an aperture, an exploratory well.
'a year of misreading the wildcats' unravels a sprawling, year-long encounter with petroleum that began with a strip of plastic, caught between the branches of a maidenhair tree. This hybrid collection of poetry, prose and Polaroid photography drills the archive for film scores, fiction, and scholarship to recover the intertextual saturations of plastic and plankton, oil and oceans. Toggling between phantom islands and garbage gyres, the Pacific and Pennsylvania, a year of misreading the wildcats documents the impossible project of both environmental literature and photography to critique and catalogue disaster. This collection is a refusal for a narrative, where climate change denies the islands' one.

How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of what one knows have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others?

These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we've learned--each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu--this anthology project was born.

In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish--that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit. Instead, let there be a steady effort to compile lore and take inventory of strategies, intersections, bridges; to map our histories, to sight possibilities for the future.

We are honored and thankful to have the words of the following poets in this anthology: Mai Der Vang (Foreword), Ching-In Chen, Addie Tsai, Tony Robles, Wendy Gaudin, Ernesto L. Abeytia, Abigail Licad, Tim Seibles, Melissa Coss Aquino, Sasha Pimentel, Jose Angel Araguz, Khadijah Queen, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, and Kenji Liu.

In The Book of Everyday Instruction--which presents a body of work developed between 2015 and 2018, split into eight chapters--Bass radicalizes the language through which we experience, navigate, and discuss intimacy. She surrenders the role of author in this evolving narrative, and instead approaches each chapter with an eagerness to let the story write itself. Bass imagines a series of interpersonal interactions wherein she shares creative license with her collaborators, an eclectic group of strangers she finds on the internet, through research, and within her diverse creative communities of practice. - Nico Wheadon, The Brooklyn Rail

Instead of setting the stage for familiarity and comfort as politeness most often does, Bass' announces the space in which she lets us know what she will and will not do for us. It is a smile that says, No.; It is the space in which she articulates her refusal to take control, to tell you what to think, to look for you, to, in a certain dramatically put sense, be The Artist; Which is not at all to say there is nothing to say, nothing to read or see - what there is is vast and infinitely specific and imbued with a rare intelligence and sentiment. But the only way you can see it is to take responsibility for your own seeing. To take responsibility for yourself as another singularity, a specific singularity bringing with it all the historical baggage that is positionality. Bass invites us to play a different game, one in which neither the rules nor we are familiar. - Bill Dietz, Politesse against the social

In 2015, conceptual artist Chlo Bass began a two-year chronicle of one-on-one social interactions, beginning with the question How do we know when we're really together? Through private performances, interactive experiences, text installations, interviews and photography, Bass explored the pair relationship, expanding ideas of place, history, activity, and distance.

In developing the project, Bass conceptualized the book as an exhibit; now, in collaboration with The Operating System, she presents an exhibit as a book.

Unnatural Bird Migrator stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse, a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. 'UNBM' traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile, looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the other side of the linguistic threshold already changed. This translinguistic praxis explores writing as a mode of perpetual displacement, translating language in wide spirals outward to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide, while gleaning materials for a poetics from even the minutest residues left behind. Resnikoff's compositional method engages by (mis)translation in/to​ Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Aramaic- and Akkadian- adapted​ sonic/semantic properties in​ grammar, syntax and lexicon, taking English as its temporary host while performing perpetual inflectional slippages-interlingual punning and fusion-slangs-as much as the host can absorb. The dybbuk (Yiddish: spirit-possessor), which the author's Jewish-Ashkenazi ancestors believed to inhabit the body of the wild stutterer, mad person, heretic or akher lit. other], becomes the peripheral focus​ of this poetry, as Resnikoff reimagines the ways in which such a possession by language itself might manifest in the ​odd practices of the poet, translator and Jew. The word odd here functions in deliberate echo of the terms against which Sabbatean stigma was first transcribed in 17th-century Palestine: for the odd practices of a false messiah.

Ariel Resnikoff's 'Unnatural Bird Migrator' ignites immediacy. It cast spells. Indeed one's cells feel subsumed by primordial realia having nothing in common with the plagiarized density that purports to signify experience reduced as it is to secular equation by lucre. Resnikoff's 'UNBM' roams via the telepathy of wonder. As readers we begin to gather experience that articulates a plane suffused by magnificence, by the voice of the uncanny. This being language that allows us to crystallize fever, to excavate hunches via the mathematics of power. -Will Alexander

Damm's distinctive style of collage transforms 1950s horror comics into true stories of artistic failure.

One artist's quixotic quest to clone Martin Luther King, Jr. A pioneering silent film director pushed from the industry by her controlling husband. A writer who tries to write popular fiction but ends up in the avant-garde.

Featuring radical Argentinian art collective Tucumán Arde, conceptual artists Pope L. and Marta Minujín, filmmakers Alice Guy Blaché and Pere Portabella, Mexican superhero Superbarrio Gómez, and more, Failure Biographies celebrates the struggles of great 20th and 21st century innovators who attempted - and failed - to change the world.

POWER ON is written from the perspective of our automated futures, the machines that have been coded with our present imperatives and ethics. If our colonialist interaction with the natural world and each other is presently characterized by racist and capitalist homogenization and amnesia, and if we think of technology as more than tools but as our representatives, then technological entities that carry out our work are the turning on of our ongoing script, never meant to end until forced to by powering off - through an impossibility of continuance, however that will come about.

The POWER ON app explores the ethical implications of technoscience programming by also allowing readers/users to collaborate with the manuscript by uploading their own individualized perspectives into the manuscript, creating a collaboration between machine and reader. With this collaboration, Ko seeks to provoke more than just a fun form of interactivity with poetry. Along with promoting accessibility features in poetry publication, the app seeks to highlight alongside the project the poet's belief in readerly agency and the fact that each reader/user brings their own highly contextual perspective to a book of poetry; readerly immersion in a text is counterbalanced by a reader's identity. What does it mean to make work that does not desire for readers/users to conform themselves to the identity of the text? If what makes reading poetry and writing so gratifying and dialogic, are our capacities for empathy and bearing witness, what can the space of an interactive poetry app offer, when that witness is invited in to co-create?

The POWER ON app is intended to disentangle poetry from its common perception as being bound by either the materiality of paper pages or by direct transcription onto digital pages. User-contributed components will create a unique collaboration between my text and individuals who encounter it in the app, highlighting the aesthetic possibilities of poetry in digital form. Rather than transferring poetic traditions to new media in the form of the digital display of a page or book, the app investigates how poetic traditions can be transformed by the further possibilities of audience contributions in the form of image, sound, and video. The POWER ON app hopes to make evident that creating poetry with new media is both easy and incredibly customizable, as well as capable of accessible design that is attentive to inclusive design needs.

As part of the Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts series, The OS presents FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, a revised and expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg's variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition the book has been redesigned and expanded, featuring an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen's writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate.

The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the 'human / other-than-human worlds' originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice -Cecilia Vicu a

Exploring a tangled, unsettled love for place amid the landscape, cultures, and social and ecological crises of South Louisiana, ARK HIVE seeks amid the ruins for answers--what does it mean to be here, now? Following the ley-lines carved out in the streets and bayous of a rapidly eroding landscape, this collection refuses stability, confident of only the riddle and the manifold voices activating it. Reed's formal hybridity juxtaposes hand-made maps, collaged language, and altered documents with lyrics and lyric essays: fragments from] journals, photographs, memory, archives--time capsule of a disintegrating world. ARK HIVE bears its loves and dead along the current of the work's own profligate vegetative urge--accretions of history and immersion, saturations of grief and delight. Tender and monumental, a teeming hive of voices, ARK HIVE returns an extraordinary, vanishing world to the center of our attention.

There are locations--like Hawai'i, like Louisiana--where cultures are unique to the place, and outsiders are made to know themselves from insiders. As a poet familiar with issues of appropriation and theft, Marthe Reed asked herself how a Californian who had lived in Providence and Perth, could write about Louisiana, a place she loved over her many years of living in Lafayette. Writing Louisiana, outsider-inside, poles of affection and alienation push and pull against me. Her answer was to piece together an archive, and to write an epic from its documents: photographs, maps, names of birds, travel journals, histories, languages. What ultimately brings this material to life are the heart-lyrics stitched through the whole: from threnody I keep the contents of my heart / stacked in wet clay / heavy with downpour, where behind the grate the small / eyes of an armadillo / muted reek / of urine and feces .] The threnody she wrote was for a beautiful, fraught, and fragile place. It grieves me to write my paragraph in the past tense. Shortly before she died she told me, We're all going to die and no one will remember us; it's ok. We are here to remember her and this ravishing, important, necessary work. --Susan M. Schultz

H kuri (Peyote) is Mexican Infrarealist Jos Vicente Anaya's cult-classic poem.

Influenced by his participation in a series of peyote ceremonies in his native Chihuahua, Anaya charts a transformative journey inwards, towards a psychedelic convergence of inside/outside, male/female, past/present, self/other. Incorporating Rar muri language and traversing territory associated with ecopoetics, ethnopoetics, modernism, and infrarealism, H kuri (Peyote) presents a utopian alternative to EuroAmerican colonial modernity-a reclamation of autonomy and poetic nomadism.

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An excerpt of this translation appears at:

https: //www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/jose-vicente-anaya-hikuri-peyote/

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Jos Vicente Anaya's long, visionary poem H kuri (Peyote) is a countercultural classic of Mexican literature. But it is not only that: it is a mapping of the borderlands of self, a meditation on the ethnopoetic and its limits, and a celebration of the chant as eco-indigenous form that challenges the colonial politics of the lettered city. While Anaya is often mentioned for his transnational involvement with alternative poetry movements (Beat poetry, Mexican Infrarealism), H kuri (Peyote) is its own translingual poetics of luminous defiance: 'I go into uncertainty certain / of ending up uncertain / INCANDESCENT.' Whereas Artaud engaged Rar muri language and culture through the unabashedly imperial eyes of the tourist poet, Anaya proposes an uneasily decolonial auto-ethnographic poetics that works both from and against the settler logic of the avant-gardes in the Americas. Joshua Pollock's translation powerfully renders the visual and sonic layers of Anaya's song with careful attention to the politics of oral/aural revolution, the gaps of meaning, the silences of a page where 'the True Name is not written.'--Urayo n Noel

In H kuri (Peyote), Jos Vicente Anaya gives us an experience more than a poem. Or, rather, the poem is the experience. Here contemporary hallucination is rooted in ancient ritual, and Joshua Pollock's seamless translation gives the reader a map as deep as it is broad, one upon which we may find our own pathways in these terrifying times.--Margaret Randall

H kuri Peyote] is a synesthetic delirium of language and sound streaming out of the collective unconscious - Pollock's translations of Anaya's psychedelic text form circuitous waterfalls of poetry that illuminates a M bius strip across languages. This book is a nomadic swirl of 'ESCAPE VELOCITY.' Drink some orange juice and put your phone away when you read this book. Let the languages guide 'the alchemy in your pupils' towards the unexpected.--Angel Dominguez

If any book has the ability to help us see beauty in a body abundant in transformations--from youthful health and vivacity seared with love and desire, to the slow intensification of decay and disorientation--as well as read and understand these changes through multiple linguistic iterations, Operation on a Malignant Body is it. Will Stockton's renderings of Sergio Loo's destabilizing poetry into English are just as challenging as the original Spanish: they diagnose prejudices about sexuality, illness, relationships and belief systems, to name only a few; they are risky in their resistance of melodrama, pity and simplifications; and they are sonically beautiful. This collection is resuscitating, prescribing an approach to how we can comprehend the body riddled with illnesses, both psychological and physical, how we can fathom the reality of illness as 'a succession of language, ' because 'Metastasis is synonymous with fear. And it spreads, ' just as a 'body can reveal itself through tests, analysis, x-rays. Not the power of the doctors.' The body across this book is a 'contradiction' between what is seen and from where: Loo reminds us that reality is the succession of language, ' and that those who care for us may know how our bodies function, but they do 'not know what it wants.' - Curtis Bauer, author of The Real Cause for Your Absence, translator of Jeannette L. Clariond's Leve Sangre.

This dual-language collection of prose poems and diagrams leverages the late prolific queer Mexican poet Sergio Loo's diagnosis with cancer (an Ewing's Sarcoma in the left leg) to explore anatomical, linguistic, and social relationships between queerness and disability. With an introduction from Loo's friend, Mexican writer Jonathan Minila.

What I want is the intimacy of anonymous encounters within the text itself, and yet to be effaced and revealed, even and especially by my own authorial departure. And it would take the form of a repetition or a reversal; a re: verse in which we correspond lyrically; a re: verse in which our correspondence becomes the poem.

Of course, an integral part of any correspondence is the space between things, those slender apertures lit up with waiting. It is in these liminal spaces that possibility accumulates. We write toward this space, in response to its silences.

Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction is playful abecedarian speaks back to its titular epithet by looking both figuratively and literally at the navel. It includes the curious state of lint and bacteria and what humans have been known, disgustingly, to do with them (hello, navel cheese ). Also appearing: Hawaiian and Hindu origin stories rooted in the navel that connect us, with urgency, to the divine; the role of the navel, our first wound, in and after human birth; a story of the author's own regrettable 90s-era teenage navel piercing and the plastic surgery that removed her mother's navel, and more.

Styled as a self-referencing cabinet of curiosities, this chapbook provides compounding insight into the navel. It is also a Rorschach for the genre of creative nonfiction. This text demands you be swayed to see what, in fact, is so good about looking at one's own navel after all.

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as John McPhee, Rachel Carson, Timothy Morton, Frank White, and others, LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD explores philosophies of nature old and new through poetry and science fiction. The anthropocene crisis and the crisis of humanity-as-invasive-species are framed in this text as global, as well as personal, misadventures. A mixed-genre work, readers encounter poems and stories-islands and continents-in a rapid succession of speculative geography, and readers are invited to join its beleaguered, psychozoic populations.

Peter Milne Greiner's poems range widely across space, time, and cultural history-from the Magna Carta to The Little Mermaid, from the pyramids to the astronomical observatory at Mauna Kea-and catch up in their full-throttle trajectory a universe of detail about the nature of things. Indeed, the poet's brooding over the fate of Geena Davis as well as that of 'lame dystopias' suggests nothing so much as Lucretius's epic enterprise: 'I mine human doing, ' Greiner declares, 'for all its garish hyper objects.' By deploying a language alert to figurative provocation that's sharpened by a tautly disjunctive syntax, Greiner uncovers the apocalypse in the quotidian and raises everyday life to fearsome implication. -Albert Mobilio

LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD is in the world, but it's not of it. Peter Milne Greiner is the voice of the cosmic mundane-sublime, real, and existentially funny. -Claire L. Evans

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Hopping the Imaginary's Obscure Islands An OS [re: con]versation with Peter Milne Greiner

In Still Rooms is more than a haunted house novel--a strange hybrid drawing its aesthetic equally from ancient Greek drama, ecopoetics, and the Gothic tradition. Set in an old house in rural East Tennessee, three generations of a Greek-American family mourn the loss of a matriarch who reveals herself to each of them uniquely. Regardless of the family's comings and goings, the reader remains always in the house. In this house, religion, mythology, and superstition all rule equally. In this house, saints speak to mothers from their plaques on the wall; ancient deities manifest in the minds of children; a Chorus of those who have previously died there address the reader directly; and ultimately, the house itself begins to speak.

Vormorgen aims to collect all of Ernst Toller's poetic works in a single volume; the first to appear in nearly a century.

This edition, in German and English, includes Toller's three principle poetic works: Vormorgen, The Poems of the Imprisoned, and The Book of Swallows, as well as his scattered, uncollected poems.

Toller was a Jewish anarchist working in Munich, and was briefly the president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Münchner Räterepublik / Munich Worker's Republic), which was predominantly organized by poets and playwrights, so it's often been referred to as the regime of coffeehouse anarchists.

The occupation began peacefully, with the anarchists occupying Munich without firing a shot, but was ended brutally a month later, on May Day, when the Freikorps were sent in. Over 600 people were killed, half of which were citizens killed in street fighting. Some were sentenced to death by firing squad, others were sentenced to prison. Ernst Toller was sent to Niederschönenfeld prison for five years, where he began working on the majority of his poems. When he was released, he was exiled to the UK, and later to the States. While living in New York, he received word that his mother and sister were sent to concentration camps, and he took his life in 1939.