Bøker utgitt av City Lights Books

The famed New York School bard's ruminations and deep ponderings, written during random Manhattan lunch hours.

Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.

"Secrets of Voodoo" traces the development of this complex religion (in Haiti and the Americas) from its sources in the brilliant civilizations of ancient Africa. This book presents a straightforward account of the gods or loas and their function, the symbols and signs, rituals, the ceremonial calendar of Voodoo, and the procedures for performing magical rites are given."Voodoo," derived from words meaning "introspection" and "mystery," is a system of belief about the formation of the world and human destiny with clear correspondences in other world religions. Rigaud makes these connections and discloses the esoteric meaning underlying Voodoo's outward manifestations, which are often misinterpreted. Translated from the French by Robert B. Cross. Drawings and photographs by Odette Mennesson-Rigaud.Milo Rigaud was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, in 1903, where he spent the greater part of his life studying the Voodoo tradition. In Haiti he studied law, and in France ethnology, psychology, and theology. The involvement of Voodoo in the political struggle of Haitian blacks for independence was one of his main concerns.

The sequel to his famous book, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man reprints rare Bukowski columns unseen in decades.

The first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language.

First and only book of speeches on racism, community, freedom, and politics in the U.S. by international icon Angela Davis.

In spontaneous, direct, and concrete verses, the author confesses his joy in poetry and life.

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time."For many ill-informed people, the name 'André Breton' is synonymous with surrealism. They are right. Without Breton, surrealism, even assuming it existed, would have been nothing more than a literary school. With him, it was a way of life."—Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the MetroAs leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades."A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture."—New York TimesTo be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.

Little Red Barns is a groundbreaking investigation of factory farms and the unprecedented measures being taken to hide their impact — on animals, public health, and the environment — from the public.Will Potter had planned to write a book about a troubling form of censorship, namely, a host of new "ag-gag" laws that criminalize photographers and journalists as terrorists for their efforts to expose abuses on factory farms. But his work soon expanded into a much larger investigation of a nexus of political corruption and corporate power that works to silence protest and to obscure reality with propaganda. What emerges is a chilling account of the secret campaigns of weaponized storytelling being used to prevent us from seeing the ecological, public health, and authoritarian threats that these farms represent.Potter's journalistic practice of bearing witness took him to places he had never expected, from factory farms to fascist groups, from whistleblowing to censorship laws, political corruption and propaganda campaigns, and the book is an immersive, engaging personal account of the ups and downs of his journey. A well-woven tale of investigative reporting, archival research, photography, and memoir, Little Red Barns is about how the biggest industries on the planet hide from the public and secretly campaign to silence protest. The little red barns are a case study, and a warning for anyone concerned about the right to protest and hold corporations accountable.

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates—sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair—the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

"Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943-1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948-1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963-1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture. This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time"--

"COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco meditates on the extraordinary time of loss, isolation, and bizarre rituals of the Covid era and its aftermath. First performed at sold-out theaters in New York, where the Village Voice compared Karen Finley to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, this vivid suite of poems invokes a maelstrom of feelings that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page. In COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Finley processes the pandemic in all its complexity-from the collective coping strategies during isolation and loss to the absurd new habits we acquired, from handwashing to wiping down groceries to decorative double masks and zoom dance parties. The New York City hotspot echoes an earlier AIDS era; that rage and sorrow remain part of the City's DNA. During COVID, tragic historic events such as the police murder of George Floyd and the continued brutality on Black and brown bodies, challenged the nation. Revolution took to the streets. The reversal of Roe v Wade and the criminalizing of trans peoples' bodies, mental health realities, houselessness, essential workers' rights, and social isolation brought desperate conditions. Finley reflects on these traumas, asking how do we employ love despite the hate, to encourage humanity despite proliferating violence? On the fifth anniversary of the pandemic lockdown, COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco looks back while also looking forward, offering art as salvation, and the deep belief in the power of words, compassion, and humor to transcend the harsh realities of today"--

"A memoiristic travelogue that illuminates the enduring legacy of the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II"--

An underground denizen of San Francisco soars above it in a state-of-the-art long poem. Over a decade ago, Patrick James Dunagan stoically refused to be published in the Spotlight series, citing his desire to maintain critical independence as a prolific reviewer of contemporary poetry. Finally, he has been prevailed upon to turn over a manuscript, City Bird and Other Poems. Defying the media narrative of the city's demise, the poems of City Bird celebrate the joys of San Francisco, invoking artists like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, poets like Bill Berkson and Lew Welch, and local landmarks like O'Farrell Street, St. Anne of the Sunset, and Thrasher magazine, all the while foregrounding Dunagan's lightly worn erudition. But the book stands on its lengthy title poem, a tour de force combining composition and collage, filtered through the poet's laid-back lyricism. Unapologetically literary with its understated formal imperatives, City Bird is at once a self-referential poetics, examining itself unfolding, and a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Hugh, the nominal protagonist, seemingly engaged in eating a sandwich. Proustian in its sweep, even as it courts a ludicrous Beckett-like minimalism, the poem takes sidelong glances at our contemporary political malaise, while contemplating consciousness itself. If Ashbery had written "The Skaters" about skateboarders, it might have come out very like City Bird. A major achievement in contemporary American poetry, City Bird further confirms Dunagan's reputation as the best-kept secret of San Francisco. "Nothing is left unseen, including present memories years before with friends, or a dramatic monologue through recent readership, receiving everyone's voices into a huge collage . . . City Bird is all this and more. A meditation and intense easy stroll through a poet's city and all the things that make up a gorgeous life within it, listening and living."-Micah Ballard, author of Waifs and Strays

"More than simply a book, Cartoons proposes itself as a genre of imaginary writing in opposition to the realism of most contemporary U.S. fiction, aligning itself with the French symbolism and Latin American fabulism its author is known to translate. A giant cricket with a tiny Kit Schluter in a jar, The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, an umbrella who confuses the words porpoise and purpose in its quest for self-fulfillment, these are just a few denizens of its pages, suffused with a fairy tale-like animism. A pair of slugs go on a bender. A microwave oven decries microaggressions. A beer bottle is filled with regret. An escalator mechanic's shoe conceals a terrible secret. As befits its title, Cartoons defies the laws of physics and fiction alike, eschewing tonal consistency in favor of a simultaneity of joy and horror, ecstasy and disgust, wrapped in an extravagant layer of black humor. The stories blur the boundary between microfiction and poet's prose, featuring impossible transformations and surrealistic events, even as they wrestle with urgent psychic and moral dilemmas. Heightening the atmosphere of pervasive unreality are a number of drawings by the author, which don't so much illustrate as parallel the tales with their own fantastic scenarios"--

"This recently discovered treasure is a stunning portrait of sex, family, religion, culture of origin, and the betrayals of the body. Tender and blistering, erotic and spiritual - Cuadros dives into these complexities which we grapple with today, showing us how to survive these times, and beyond"--

"Abya Yala"-"land of life" or "land of vital blood"-is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamâa and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized "New World" among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking "mobilian" as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity-in opposition to the "mobile" of phone-mediated existence-the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls "Tecs," opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. "Tecumseh Republic" is the poet's name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamâa, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit"--

"Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world. Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the Greater Middle East, a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here are either native to the region, or part of a diasporic community, a diverse mix of men and women, queer and straight, who come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name a few. Selected from among a wave of new fiction published in The Markaz Review, this 'best of' collection features both well-established and emerging writers, some being published in English for the first time. The stories span a number of styles and genres, from literary fiction to sci-fi, epistolary to noir. In 'Asha and Haaji,' Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektar Anastasiadou's 'The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,' two students in Istanbul from different classes--and religions that have often been at odds with one another--believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb's story, 'Counter Strike,' is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh's 'The Roots of Heaven' invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In 'Eleazar,' Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists--Israeli occupation forces--are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad's 'The Icarist' is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away. The Markaz Review, an online journal of literature and the arts, was founded in 2020 with a mission to showcase work from a cultural region that's often overlooked or misrepresented. Here, we get a different viewpoint. Moving from the margins to the center, or the markaz--a word and a concept shared among languages and cultures of the region--the writers featured here establish a worldview that highlights the vanguard creativity and humanity of the various populations represented in their stories"

Incendiary, lyrical poems of liberation from the oppression of Black womanhood. "To encounter the words of mimi tempestt on the page, or in performance, is to witness the rare transcendency of language where the line becomes an exacting blade. i dare you not to sleep on any prodigious Black woman’s soliloquy. i dare you to hold these words & find yourself implicated in the violent acts that serve as the backdrop to the blood spilled onto these pages. Read this book. You have no choice. Approach with caution. Defend yourself with claims of nuance and complexities. Do what you must, but know that once unsheathed these words, as Hanzo steel, have a way of cutting through the whiteness to get to the realities of Black and Brown truths."—Truong Tran, author of Book of the Other: Small in ComparisonWedding fierce, even jagged lines to an uncompromisingly lyrical flow honed over years of performance, mimi tempestt writes poems that are by turns cerebral, profane, revolutionary, comedic, erotic, and sentimental, with a visual sense that explodes across the page. the delicacy of embracing spirals is her second book, an investigation of the ways in which the personal narrative of Black womanhood can be expressed through a radically human lens, to expand on the possibilities of selfhood, liberation, and autonomy. Beginning with microcosmic poems of personal struggle and spiraling out into macrocosmic texts of social and political critique, the book culminates in an account of the impossible staging of a play where the lives of the characters and the audience are at stake. The three central questions this collection raises are “What haunts you? What hunts you? Who and what are you hunting?” the delicacy of embracing spirals blends theatre, melodrama, art, and lyricism through fragmented language, mosaic pieces, narrative, histories, and characterizations. It prioritizes the use of an ongoing dialectic to express a consciousness about being Black, being woman, being queer, being radical, being complex, being imperfect, being beautiful, being alive, being oppressed, and most essentially, being complicatedly human. The poems utilize memory and narrative to radically engage with the “performance” of oppression that gets in the way of Black womanhood and prevents Black humanity from being fulfilled. Most importantly, this collection unapologetically holds the white gaze hostage.

This is Clark Coolidge's most famous book, the one everyone references, long out of print after a 2nd successful publication with Sun & Moon Press in 1995. (The book was originally published by The Figures Press in 1986)This new edition features new material: a preface by poet and scholar Peter Gizzi, and an interview in the afterword where Coolidge addresses the genesis of the poem.Clark Coolidge is associated with the New York School and writers Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and Larry Fagin.He is also linked with the Language Poets including Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Michael Palmer.In Gizzi's preface, he mentions the many authors who consider Coolidge to be their favorite poet. This includes: James Schuyler, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Bill Corbett, Geoffrey Young, Barbara Guest, Peter Straub, Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Blaser, David Shapiro, John Yau, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Raworth, Paul Auster, Bernadette Mayer, & Fanny HoweThe Crystal Text is comparable to Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," a meditation on an object.Bay-area events are planned.

From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry.One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Notable Poetry Books for Fall 2022!“Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York TimesAgainst the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today.Praise for Divine Blue Light:"Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation"These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly"The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light"Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter

This novel offers a lyrical discussion of the rights, roles, and obligations of citizens in society as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in our lives. It’s a philosophical reflection on how Google & Co. meddle with our individual lives and our relationships with each other, and the increasingly ubiquitous control they exert on the general circulation of information, ideas, and capital.         It joins the ranks of other works of fiction that dive into these topics, such as Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail, Dave Eggers's The Every, Sherry Turkle's The Empathy Diaries, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.      The author combines an unflinching look at the contemporary realities of class in the capitalist, consumer societies with a deep affection and caring for the humans who live in them.       This novel concentrates specifically on the pervaviseness of Google—in many respects the air that many of us in the United States and Europe breathe—in terms of ethics, morals, philosophy, and human values.      Gopegui dives into these topics with beautiful and thought-provoking prose. The story will resonate with people concerned about how the internet, and social media, impact our daily lives      For readers of Machines Like Me, by Ian Mc Ewan and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which are both similar in the way they care about our future and different because this novel does not focus on the nature of machines but rather, how we humans are machines—complex and fascinating but machines in the end, and how it is for precisely that reason that why we should be more careful, tender, and brave.

Joyce Chopra is currently being recognized as a pioneer in the history of film, one of the rare women directors, a precursor, role model and inspiration to young women directing films today.         With the success of Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Lost Daughter," Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland," Ava Duvernay’s "13th," and Jane Campion's "Power of the Dog," female filmmakers are garnering more attention than ever.          Chopra discusses the kind of gender discrimination that she faced in the industry, long before #MeToo and the resulting public awareness of the gender disparities and abuse in Hollywood.         Joyce Chopra’s work is celebrated in two new/forthcoming books about women in film, including: Alicia Malone's "Girls on Film (Mango Press, March 2022);" and Amanda Reyes's forthcoming "Dangerous Passion" (Headpress 2023).       Chopra's Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film Smooth Talk is being rediscovered following its recent inclusion in the "Revivals Line-Up" at the New York Film Festival.  The New Yorker, among other high profile media, wrote about the re-release.        Hollywood support & advocacy: Smooth Talk launched actress Laura Dern's career, and she will actively promote this book.          Chopra has won numerous awards for her filmmaking, while her groundbreaking documentary, Joyce at 34, is held in the NY MoMA's permanent collection.           Upon publication the Criterion Collection channel will feature Lady Director along with a special series on Chopra's films.         Lady Director offers rare, tell-all experiences that will be appreciated by audiences who like memoir, movie and TV insider accounts, coming-of-age stories, and a woman’s struggle to achieve her dreams.