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A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections.

"quiet orient riot is a book about birth regimes and the politics of reproduction. Tracing the immaculate conception of a child through to her birth, it unspools the many ways that liturgical commands and an intense demographic anxiety affect a journey towards motherhood. What does it mean to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, enabled through contingent access to Israel's sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure? How do you bear a body whose very creation is enabled by the pronatalist state, yet not recognized by it? How do you end up a national vessel? Are we all national vessels? While the journey is specific and localized, the larger questions that emerge from these poems are not: what kind of language may hold precarious life? What kind of poem may see a body held inside a body through emergency, diminishment and into resistance, bloom? Importantly, and over and above demographic and religious imperatives, these poems are concerned with other kinds of worship, bowing to a "chirpy printed sound," "what grows in the rubble," and "the capacity for happiness despite visual evidence." Where you look, there are water holes for the thirsty and a grove of "little justices.""--

Poetry that finds meaning and connection in the process of creating pottery from clay.   The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter's wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk's process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings of ceramic forms. For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter's hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.

A surreal story in verse that follows a woman facing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside ecological crisis and crumbling social norms.   Jennifer Hasegawa's NAOMIE ANOMIE, A Biography of Infinite Will, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.   Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie's five decades of life. We find retellings of a life's most significant moments-not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.

Poetry that considers the nature of relationships in an age mediated by social media and impacted by violence.   This is a collection of poems about how we find and cultivate love amid wars, including wars that often go ignored. Throughout Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes considers how we define love and who gets to experience it, paying special attention to the ways that race and sex influence how we are perceived and valued by society. Through the voice of a Black woman coming to terms with her own perspectives on relationship-building, Reyes shows the damage that contemporary culture can do to women, and Black women in particular. Resisting passivity, Reyes's poetry cuts through pervasive doom scrolling, virtue signaling, and parasocial relationships, inviting readers to remember what care is really supposed to feel like.

Poetry and prose that takes on multiple forms to celebrate queer polyamorous families.   Liza Flum's Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.   The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.

A poetic documentation of imperial structures through the story of a shipwrecked Spanish trade vessel.   In this work of hybrid historiography, Sam Creely modulates the English sentence to map the ways anglophone imperial self-fashioning moves in and out of social coherence, investigating how syntactic requirements reflect colonial history and how the rules of language structure thought. Through scenes including intimate encounters with dye, fabric, and garments, Creely reveals the sexual and racial grammars of empire.  Inventorys takes as its point of departure the voyage, shipwreck, and eventual excavation of the Spanish trade vessel El Nuevo Constante. Animated by the image of sixty thousand pounds of dye bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, this six-part poetic documentation follows the wreckage of the Constante linguistically, moving among early modern lexicography, and ultimately toward enmeshed histories of catalog, fabrication, and revision.  Inventorys is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Shane McCrae.

A collection of poems and essays that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events.   Alibi, in Latin, meant "elsewhere," and "lullaby"-from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by-has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of "thrill, dread, certainty."   In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, "empathy through distress," unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.   The poetry of Laynie Browne's Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.

"A hybrid book-length poem in which the protagonist grapples with a great loss. In this hybrid of lyric poetry and essay, Consuelo Wise utilizes repetition, fragmentation, and syntax to construct a form that repeatedly falls apart. Breaks in lines and fragmented stanzas are followed by accumulative rushes, slashes, brackets, and words pushed together. Throughout this book-length poem, Wise composes a meditation and an investigation into loss and identity. Moving between sound and image, aggression and subtlety, b o y pries open memories that resist understanding but also refuse to be forgotten. Wise peels back layers of mourning, considering how it can be experienced as a personal, inherited, environmental, social, and historical phenomenon. Throughout, the protagonist in b o y reenvisions ways to process a great loss, listening closely and searching for words while "the earth is shaking and the silence is pressing down." "--

"Julie Carr's most intimate book to date, The Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr's foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender-at times erotic at other times bitter-these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living and the dead. Reaching at once toward the "ghost companions in the thicket" and to the beloveds who still "pulse with activity," The Underscore's sonically intricate poems ultimately yearn toward a public intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, what Stark Smith called "overlapping kinespherees." There, in the "green, green underscore," "the darkened / cloth / changes / hands.""--

"Call this mutiny is the seventh book from award-winning and internationally-renowned Pacific Islander author Craig Santos Perez. These poems were originally published in journals and anthologies between 2008-2023, but this is the first time they have been collected into a single volume. Throughout, Perez continues his critical exploration of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current residence of Hawai°i, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. As he reminds us about the power of storytelling: 'If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.'"--

"Poems that offer an anti-capitalist consideration of life and selfhood for women in contemporary society. The poetry in Elizabeth Scanlon's Whosoever Whole asks how we arrive at and nurture a sense of self amid a culture that wants us only to consume. Navigating the fractal and often fractured experiences of a citizen, a parent in the time of climate change, and a woman in an embattled era, Scanlon invites the reader into an interior space filled with anger, joy, wonder, and hope. Employing metaphor and metonymy, these poems portray a series of courageous portraits of the many faces a woman must wear to survive in today's culture. Whosoever Whole is an anti-capitalist love song to all who refuse to be torn apart by the market valuation of their lives. "--

"Poems as music arise from the poet's sixty years as a classical guitarist and his preoccupation with the tonalities of day-to-day life. Each poem in the book contributes to a multi-orchestrated symphony encompassing the delights and travails of family life and the moments of intimate connection with the animals and plants with which the poet comes into contact. At the core of the book are poems delving into the nearly impossible task to communicate the essence of a musical experience using the written word. It is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, imagistic surprise, and formal variation"--

"Emily Dickinson begins one of her best-known poems with the oft-quoted line, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant -" For anyone who is Asian American, the word "slant" can be heard and read two ways. It is this sense of doubleness - culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator - that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems, all of which focus on the question of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to? Made up of eight sections, each of which explores the idea of address - as place, as person, as memory, and as event - Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Among the summoned spirits who help the author "tell all the truth," the reader will hear reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers - including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester - among the multitudes contained"--

"It all comes in sleep. Things are often not as they appear, or as you remember. Instead, they are exactly as you imagine, and only that. Animals understand the world without words, while we create our experiences as stories. Our past and future are stories we tell in the present. But how often did you discover these stories weren't true, that you misremembered something, that your logical explanation was completely wrong, that someone had lied, that a certain outcome wasn't certain at all? Does believing a lie feel different from believing a truth? Does reality change? The world in your head is the world, and the Earth turns unnoticed. You may already have a strange memory of the time when you will read this book. Don't fear - you can always read the stories backwards, then everyone will be home again. But forwards will be more rewarding"--

"Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of equal parts yearning, regret and righteous indignation. On these pages, what is said and what is written renders us seen in all our complications. I wrote this book as a singular and lifelong investigation of my being and my body as someone brown moving through white spaces. That it now finds itself bound together in a single volume and in proximity to the work of my friend Damon Potter, that he is a white man and I am a brown man, and that I am writing this into existence, means the world to me. Seeing and Looking is a recording taken in proximity to my friend Truong Tran. In this book, I examine who I am and who I want to be, the complications and realities of trying to be good while also benefitting from our oppressive past and present. I am oppressor. And also my friends die. Someday I'll die. I witness horrible acts. I witness the moon. I remember awful grains I've committed myself. In Seeing and Looking, I wonder how to be respectfully dying while everyone else is also dying. In Seeing and Looking, I witness my self"--

"Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones on highways, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queerplatonic intimacy and chronic illness. Through art and friendship, the poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. At the place where radiological light and meadow meet--at the site where the asexual speaker's body meets feather and fox skeleton--what love poem becomes possible? When the body is caught in both medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, how is a poetry fashioned despite--and out of--endings? How can a self-portrait be a form of agency when so many harmful images of the sick queer body are made by others? You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis explores these questions with forms that reach across the page, the plainspoken prose poem becoming its own strange field. In a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness, the speaker does not find easy answers. Rather, they find ways to make a life: with foreheads pressed together, with antlers in the grass"--

"Kimberly Reyes navigates the physical, hereditary, and liminal worlds between land, time, and memory. Reclaiming and examining space in San Francisco, Ireland, and the Atlantic Ocean, the author performs sâeance and autopsy of all we see and do not see, and all we have left behind"--

"extraordinary tides attempts to hold a position in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems engage time and tide, and our efforts to predict and know both. If the ground beneath us is always in flux, how do we know where we are? Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral"--

"In a series of experimental ecopoems, The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts into our current climate crisis while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Anthony Cody encourages readers to participate in the radical act of refreshing and re-imagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, while intuiting what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current destructive trajectory. The Rendering asks: can wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, exist in the Anthropocene? And, if wholeness cannot exist in the Anthropocene, then what of the living, once the living have "achieved" annihilation?"--

"This book speaks the language of clock-sense as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. This work's interwinding lyrics move through histories as a nervous system moves. In that body we hear this text sound out the maternal and the material as if played by fingers along the frets of meaning. We hear the poems reveal how we let our days become over-clocked and over-transactional and over-weaponed. This instrument pleads, records, nursery-rhymes, and notches sonically, investigating what it is to be close to time: collective time with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. How can we be captured in systems of measure and be complicit with them, how can we be breaking from them, creating them, and immune to them? Clock gears press against interconnecting systems-economic/capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, fantastical-where even language is a measure or prayer that takes off the face of the clock and exposes its springs and weights"--

"If the human experience is the equivalent of the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes that notion a few steps further by centering cosmology in a raced and gendered body, in a union of god and soul that, within our material world, easily vacillates between love and hate, joy and despair. The body manifests as divine presence made mortal, as an infinity singing the generative human arc of being-ness with an electric resonance. In godhouse, the reader encounters the universe made personal and celebratory, as an infinity that endures the complications of flesh and the necessary resistance to our most ungodly and monstrous expressions of personhood"--

"Etymologies conceives of language as process, rather than language as fixed history. These poems build imaginative mini-worlds of possible word-use. They create a playful quasi-reference work that flips standard assumptions about word origins-mainly that such origins exist. The text questions the intent of any writer using an etymology to prove a specific meaning. In so doing, Etymologies pays particular attention to relation: of the cultures and conflicts, migrations and hegemonies that create our words, words that are furthered by us, who in speaking push them into the future"--

"The great love of your life is dead. But that doesn't stop him from communicating with you-or luring you to join him in the afterlife. To remain safely in this world, you accept the help of a professional medium who develops his own emotional agenda. The Ghost Trio takes us to the Prague of the past, where a love triangle like no other finds its chilling and unexpected resolution. Inspired by the ghost stories of such practitioners as Henry James and Daphne du Maurier, Clyde Derrick creates three vividly original characters whose passions defy both time and the accepted boundaries between the dead and the living"--

"Ewa Chrusciel's fourth book in English, Yours, Purple Gallinule, playfully explores health and illness as they are culturally constructed. Using research about various bird species, clinical understandings of mental afflictions and their treatment through history, Chrusciel maps various diagnostics onto an array of avian species. Intended as a lyrical satire, the book is a reflection on a society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, over-medicate. Among the questions these poems ask is: What does it mean to be unique, to accept pain and suffering as a fact of life? On the pages of Yours, Purple Gallinule, we encounter birds, a poet, and a psychiatrist who diagnoses birds with various mental afflictions. The psychiatrist undergoes a series of conversions as she realizes that the point is not to classify thoughtlessly, but to "make music instead"-to dwell in astonishment. Birds evade the anthropomorphization of psychiatrists - and of poets - when psychiatrist and poet become one. The anthropomorphization goes in reverse, and the human being becomes more "other," more avian. Like Noah's dove, it proclaims a new covenant, with a twig in its beak and a message: "We are all mad; some more than others, but no one is spared the affliction. And the madder we are, the more sacred.""--

Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality. At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Pushing back on capitalist messages of individuality, CHORUS instead seeks the multifaceted self that engages with the radical diversity that characterizes any healthy ecosystem or society. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the author asks, "Whose afterimage am I?" The sprawling, celebratory, mourning chorus of this book is the sum of many voices; the words of other writers, poets, and artists are interwoven with the author's words. This is a celebration of language's capacity to supersede bodily limits, mortality, and existential loneliness. Daniela Naomi Molnar's chorus encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief. Rather than seeking resolution, these poems look through the lens of a fragmented self, dwelling in plurality, discord, and harmony. CHORUS is the winner of Omnidawn's 1st /2nd Book Prize, judged by Kazim Ali.

"The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal everyday. The title for the book and the poems contained within are derived from the default subject line of a subjectless email. The books' composition was informed by this idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the author would clear small periods of time to write and record the observations and thoughts around himself at that moment, then send it to himself for future refinement. In this way, the book takes the shape of an impressionistic 21st-century diary, often reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the speaker's sense of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is nearly hermetically sealed in their private world, the voice becomes a frame and eventual filter for the accumulations of their immediate reality. Through a reserved staccato diction that swears itself to the syllable, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. As such, (no subject) plumbs its depths in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder"--

"Back in print, Carr's powerful poems seek out and face violence and its counterforces. Julie Carr obsessively researches instances of intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs. She searches for what can be learned from the statistics, the statements by and about rapists and killers, the websites of hate groups, and the capacity for cruelty that lies within all of us. 100 Notes on Violence is a diary, a document, and a dream log of the violence that grips America and devastates so many. But Carr also offers a layered and lyric tribute to violence's counterforces: love, commonality, and care. Her unflinching "notes" provoke our minds and burrow into our emotions, leading us to confront our fears and our own complicity"--

"A poetry collection in nine sections that each take on an aspect of memory. The poems in t/here it is take multiple forms as each section reflects on variations of experience, engaging with the simultaneity of historic and present time while yearning for a future that is beyond what we can envision. In Section I, the poet grapples with ancestral legacy and connection to the natural world. Section II deals with the way one traverses the urban landscape and with various strategies of survival, and Section III recalls the observations and experiences of youth. Through nine linked poems, Section IV complicates the idea of witness under a capitalistic system bent on exploitation and devaluing the sacred human experience. Section V speaks to the lost opportunity of making profound human connections during the race to acquire more material goods. In Section VI, the poems take on the domestic and institutional places that govern our lives. A single poem forms Section VII, mapping the intersection between jazz and emotion. With Section VIII, Anderson pays homage to jazz greats and reflects on the ways that listening can carry one back to moments of growth and lamentation. The two poems that close out the book in Section IX bring the reader to a place of vulnerability, expressing the desire to be able to discern the multiple avenues of one's journey with awareness. "--