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When President Lincoln sent out the call for a voluntary army to defend the fragileUnion of States threatened by the secession of southern states, some who firstanswered the call were farm boys from western Massachusetts. This is the story of theexperiences of one regiment, the 52nd Massachusetts Volunteers, who fought theRebels in the bayou country of South Louisiana. Every participant in their engagements, the farm boys and their commanders, and the Rebels and theirs, considered south>By chance, two northern soldiers spoke the Acadian French of their Quebec neighbors.A common language permitted them a rare opportunity to communicate with the enslavedwho followed the Union soldiers to freedom without being able to communicate with theirliberators in French-speaking Acadiana.Within the framework of known history, the author has told a compelling story ofyoung men of the 52nd growing up in the crucible of war and older men and womenof disparate cultures first clashing and ultimately recognizing the commonalities oftheir cultures. The reader is delighted to learn that an appreciation of humor and thebizarre are as universal qualities of fellow men as pride and cruelty.

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and powerThis extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language--from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots--into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

A long-unavailable classic of 1960s visual poetry that atomizes and recombines the building blocks of languageA key figure--and one of the few women--in the Italian neo-avanguardia of the 1960s and 1970s, Giovanna Sandri (1923-2002) was renowned for the fearless experimentation of her visual poetry, which since 1965 has been featured in numerous Italian collections and journals.Originally published by Lerici Editore, Rome, in 1969, Sandri's first book-length work is an experiment in new reading operations. Composed with dry-transfer lettering instead of a typewriter, Capitolo Zero dissolves poetry into single letters and punctuation marks--the atomic particles of language--rearranging them in new combinations that preclude conventional meaning. Reading the book is a game for the eyes.Sandri's poetry, rooted in the fractured language of Dada, straddles the line between literature and visual art. Long out of print, this reissue of Capitolo Zero embodies DABA's commitment to art, experimental writing and visual poetry.

The first collection of the Beat mentor's long-influential permutation poems--one of the earliest examples of computer-generated literatureWritten between 1958 and 1982, Brion Gysin's "permutation poems" begin with short phrases or sentences whose constituent words are exhaustively rearranged over the course of the text. At first, Gysin wrote these poems manually, although later, in collaboration with programmer Ian Sommerville, he would write permutation poems with the assistance of a computer, making them a very early instance of computer-generated literature. Some of these works were published in books, while others exist only as audio recordings. Many derive from a 1960 BBC radio commission, "The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin," in which readings of the texts were recorded, cut up, modulated and overlapped.For the first time, this collection brings together all published and--where transcribable--unpublished versions of each poem, as well as "Cut-Ups Self-Explained," a short text by Gysin that contextualizes the work. The poems are organized in chronological order by first publication or first recording, with further versions of each poem grouped together in chronological order immediately after the initial version. This organization brings distinctions between versions into relief, allowing readers to explore the playful systematicity that undergirds this remarkable body of work.Brion Gysin (1916-86) was a multidisciplinary artist, author and poet. Born in Taplow, England, he studied painting at the Sorbonne in Paris and immigrated to New York in 1939. In the 1950s he lived in Tangier, where he first met William S. Burroughs. Gysin collaborated often; after returning to Paris, he developed the "cut-up method" with Burroughs, and with engineer Ian Sommerville he created the Dreamachine, a kinetic light sculpture. Gysin would become a mentor for generations of artists, musicians and writers, including David Bowie, John Giorno, Keith Haring, Brian Jones and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, among others.

An exacting facsimile of Umbra protagonist Norman H. Pritchard's long-rare 1971 collection of visually kinetic poetryAmerican poet Norman H. Pritchard's second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard's writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings--documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)--make themselves heard on the page. EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard's formal and conceptual sensibilities, and provides an entryway into the work of a poet whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition. DABA's publication of EECCHHOOEESS is unabridged and closely reproduces the design of the original 1971 volume. Norman H. Pritchard (1939-96) was affiliated with the Umbra group, a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement. He taught writing at the New School for Social Research and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971). His work was anthologized in publications including The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies (1970), Ishmael Reed's 19 Necromancers from Now (1970), Text-Sound Texts (1980) and others.