Bøker utgitt av Nightboat Books

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

Lauren Cook’s I Love Shopping brings the specificities of relationships into relief, creating an expanse in which it is the things which assert that an orchid is different from a scientist or a ballerina are also the characteristics which underpin their commonality. Based in a fantastic world of speakers which could be anyone, Cook invites readers to place themselves inside the minds of the entire population of the world, be it an ancient rock, a child, a rose bush, honeysuckle, or the last of a particular type of orchid, eaten by a skunk in the night. First published in a limited edition, this will be the first trade edition of this cult classic.

A collection of forty-five poems and eight prose sections that explore walking, writing, and art making as divinatory practices.Which Walks begins with a prologue that introduces its themes of endlessly walking while aging and existing—even thriving—in this strange current world. It was also written in relation to the visual practice taken up by the author after an approximately fifty-year break. From the prologue: “An inveterate Blakean, she rereads The Four Zoas as well as his Laocoön with its assertion that “Practice is Art If you leave off you are lost.” This motto of her youth continues to work in her old age. Her witchiness is not a choice but how she is seen by others. It is a strong, if vexed, position from which to work and see.”

A new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community.From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.

A spell casting parable of possibility, as well as a meditation on sacrifice, solitude, and the mother-daughter relationship. Crocosmia is a philosophical fable, a work of speculative, feminist eco-fiction centered on Maya, an elderly woman, recollecting the "great turning"-an epochal shift away from Capitalist death drive towards egalitarian eco-socialism. Maya recalls how her mother, Jane, a revolutionary poet, artist, and carpenter-philosopher created a telekinetic artwork that helped catalyze radical social transformation and the demise of patriarchal warlordism. The novel dreams of environmental healing, radical social, economic, and cultural transformation and speculates about the artist's role in this process.

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood.Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, jzl jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

The poems in Fuel pick at the weave of oil-fueled world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives.Traversing the underworld of Central Valley oil fields and champagne rooms, Stockton articulates blurry modes of extraction, consent, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and social collapse. Fuel illuminates the ways oil lubricates, saturates, and even drives our most intimate relations, ultimately infecting our inner worlds with fantasies of “The End.”

I Hope This Helps bends genre to engage poetry and poetics across both form and format, untangling epidemics of loneliness, isolation, and crises of mental wellness.As cultural fractures cross multiple axes, these poems seek to act as a balm, reaching out directly to acknowledge our experiences both collective and uniquely individual. Here poetry lives as music and film, as image and movement across fields both cosmic and poetic. Bashir grapples with personal and structural expressions of racialized violence with her signature wit and charisma across these tight, cutting poems of love, loss, travel, and belonging.

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is David Wojnarowicz's memoir of childhood and adolescence amidst the AIDS epidemic, saturated with the air of desperation and the specter of violence.Wojnarowicz appears here as an abused child, an adolescent prostitute, an adult living with HIV. The book is preoccupied with ruins and ruination; the impulse to make public different lives and desires; the insistence on pleasure, and the implication of politics in pleasure-the themes that contoured Wojnarowicz's life and work. What comes forth is language as desolate as a world that wanted him dead, and an insistence on life in spite of it.

Tied together by the strings of a corset, Unsex Me Here is a dazzling showcase of other worlds near and distant, and the high femme ramblers who've found and lost their way through them.From a shapeshifting garden somewhere in Michigan to a West Texas town with a supernatural past, from a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite to a secret waterfall in Texarkana: from nowhere to anywhere, Aurora Mattia chases glimpses of paradise. Her gemstone prose shatters into starbursts of heartbreak and rapture, gossip and holy babble, bringing together a cast of spiders, sibyls, angels, mermaids, girlfriends, and goddesses in vain pursuit of their unnameable selves. Their perils are as dense with symbolism as they are refined by desire-if beauty is the labyrinth, it is also the light.

A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet’s body and the world. In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound—words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation. An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa.

A series of meditative long poems that ritualize perception as a way of maintaining kinship with the non-human world.In Material Witness, the poet as human subject keeps vigil over the material world as the quotidian unfolds. The line between observer and observed blurs as non-human agency reveals itself, its own kind of witnessing. In her long poem “Concerning Matters Culinary” inspired by the first Latin cookbook, Machado activates the living matter of gustatory life with wry humor and subtle critique. Encouraging us to eschew nostalgia for deep presence, Machado’s poems remind us that “experience is phenomenal in its segues.”

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices.Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow’s research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity.”

Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic.¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows. Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an “ally.” Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!’s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha’s invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

Experimental poet and translator Mónica de la Torre’s new collection is a document of both the events of 2020 and the process of a poet rethinking artistic practice as she tracks subtle shifts in her experience during multiple global crises.As the world shuts down, Mónica de la Torre’s poems become gregarious sites of encounter—homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by looping the temporalities of dreams, art, the natural world, emotion, and odd encounters under extraordinary circumstances. Richer and more playful than straightforward records, these poems are portals into the intangible dimensions of daily life.

A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance—informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body. If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical “figures” of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden’s most influential and beloved poets.In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of “clear velocity.”

Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith's forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: "what we do with our bodies changes worlds."

"A taught, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life. "Dawn Lundy Martin's poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for the Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief--a tender body to live in"--

Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar.

"Collaged from journals and notebooks kept during a period of chronic illness, economic precarity, and heartbreak, Poem Bitten by a Man captures crisis by cutting up the record of a queer life lived in devotion to poetry and visual art"--

A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art. In these interviews with journalist and editor Laure Adler, conducted in the months before her death in November 2021, Etel Adnan traces with depth and emotion the founding experiences of her artistic approach, between poetry and painting. From her youth in Lebanon, her American years in New York and California, to her late recognition at Documenta in 2012 and her life in France, the conversation covers philosophy, painting, poetry and aesthetics, as well Adnan's views on history and politics in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. These transcripts usher the experiences and observations of Adnan's long and rich life into an intimate and spontaneous conversation with a dear friend—a window on the “universe” of her imagination.

A debut poetry collection about Earth and to Earth that contemplates imposed systems-gender, capitalism, time, wage and exploitation-and how they are mapped onto us, the trees, and the planet.Immersed in a tangled weave of contemporary life where big box stores and suburban parking lots coexist alongside the instructive silence of juniper trees and a pulsing waterfall, Our Air sketches the possibilities of eco and social interdependence during late-stage capitalism.Their inscriber, Nora Treatbaby, is a trans woman reckoning with the constraints of gender categories, when being a woman is "an implausible dream" and "an insane vibration." With sincere curiosity and a sprinkling of levity, these poems advocate for the world-building potential available in a material commitment to gentle friendship with all networks of life on Earth.

"Love Is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon's own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love Is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon's writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice."--Publisher's website.

"In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making."--

Laura's Desires is a diptych of two formally distinct long poems, each approaching various pop-cultural artifacts as a way to engage with longing, vulnerability, and the possibility of liberation. Referencing pop culture artifacts, from hit '90s singles like Selena's "Dreaming of You" to heroines of cult classic TV and films (Laura Palmer and Variety's Christine), this dynamic collection looks to these iconic touchstones as sites for feminist analysis and intervention. Traveling through dreamscapes, fantasy, and the quotidian, Laura's Desires forges a path away from fear and shame, guiding us towards liberation.

"A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy."--