“Anastacia-Reneé’s (v.) broils the alphabet with accents of Zora and bobby pins and tangled braids; she is busy here melding a blackgirl womansong with a backbeat of black jesus and barbie heads; she is weaving a ghosted blues of cop cars and sparrow eyes; she is translating a language of pain to a semaphore of power. Open these pages and “un-fly yourself/ upward to the moonlight/ christen your feet/ within a wrecked nest…” and witness a unique voice that has come into its own.” —Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize

About the Author:
Anastacia-Reneé (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish) and, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere and Sidenotes from the Archivist forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins). They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Renee was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020) and Jack Straw Curator (2020). Her work has been anthologized in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Afrofuturism, Black Comics, And Superhero Poetry, Joy Has a Sound, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. Their poetry, fiction and nonfiction has been published widely.

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? Borsuk bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

amaranthborsuk.com

Catherine Bresner’s the empty season is an exquisite collection that comprises poetry, collage, illustration, and song. Her poems not only boldly challenge the ways that we as readers understand mental illness, femininity, cultural artifacts, and identity, but they interrogate the ways we understand the language of poetry altogether.

In her artist statement, Bresner writes, “When I create a poetry comic, I am writing from a place that is essentially ekphrasis in reverse. Typically, I will write a poem first and create a comic that complicates the first reading of that poem. I believe that the best poetry comics are ones that use images that are as mysterious as the language of poetry. Duplication is deadweight. Therefore, I like for a tension between word and image to exist, especially if metaphors are used. While I have illustrated comics in the past, digital collage seems well suited for the poems that I write. Just as I didn’t create language as a medium for poems, I didn’t create the images I collage together either. I am reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s words, “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” I always try to take my poetry comics to a place of instability, evocation, and conundrum.”

Snarky, bawdy, and tender, Bresner’s hybrid poetry collection is a starling first book.

Expanding breathlessly in the magnitude of loss, Mercy confronts despair to emerge anew with a bright offering of elegy. Beginning at her mother’s hospital bed, Camia invites readers to keep vigil while she journeys through seasons of bereavement, from the wake to the graveside, and into a year of processing, searching, and healing. Ethereal and elegant, Camia’s reflections are grounded in grief as they do the aching work of mourning and moving forward.

Finalist for the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize

Set against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.

Forthcoming April 22!

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

Book of ecopoetry by Tjawangwa Dema, with illustrations by Tebogo Cranwell and a foreword by Chris Abani.

Wide-ranging and polyvocal, an/other pastoral questions what we imagine to be the boundaries between humans and nature. History, belonging and race converge with climate crisis, ecosystems and care in these startling and vibrant poems by Tjawangwa Dema. With illustrations by Tebogo Cranwell and a foreword by Chris Abani, an/other pastoral is a compelling collection that refuses easy representations of where nature can be found, and what it means to be human now.

About the Author:
Tjawangwa Dema is a poet and educator. The Careless Seamstress, her first full-length collection, won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.

Laura, or Scenes from a Common World, an original work from Square Top Theatre, explores the borderlands between film, theatre, dance, literature, and the contemporary fine arts. Laura combines visceral physicality, lyrical poetry, and evocative cinematography to explore one woman’s struggle to make herself at home in the world. Her struggle begins as a common one. A boy has left her. In losing him, she becomes less sure of the roles other people play in her self-creation. She seeks security in isolation only to find that landscape, community, and physical embodiment all ground who we are in ways she cannot escape. In this spare five-part drama, inspired by Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne myth, audiences see Laura seeking freedom by running away from the world, yet finding freedom, ultimately, in rootedness.

About the Author:
Damon Falke is an American writer living in northern Norway. His work includes, among others, By Way of Passing, Now at the Uncertain Hour, and Laura, or Scenes from a Common World. Much of his work considers relationships between memory and the present, particularly as they are expressed through objects and landscapes. In addition to writing, he has lived and traveled broadly, both as a traveler and a sportsman. Greece, Nepal, Tibet, Tasmania, Hungry, New Zealand, Slovenia, East Texas and the American West have, in different ways, touched his work. Concepts of place and places themselves are essential to his writing for what they speak of history and of the stories we keep. His half-acre in the far north is a good location for finding these things and for looking out of the kitchen window.

“I wonder if there is an exact moment
When I gave up the idea of permanence.”

The Scent of a Thousand Rains by Damon Falke is a book length poem telling a love story in verse. A man finds himself alone in an apartment in Budapest. He peers from the window to discover a woman standing on her balcony. Their unlikely connection sends him on a journey through his memories to reckon with the places and people that have ordered his life. A literary exploration of a life lived in pursuit, the poem suggests that in a life of transience and loss, love and imagination are the only things that remain to us and of us.

About the Author:
Damon Falke is an American writer living in northern Norway. His work includes, among others, By Way of Passing, Now at the Uncertain Hour, and Laura, or Scenes from a Common World. Much of his work considers relationships between memory and the present, particularly as they are expressed through objects and landscapes. In addition to writing, he has lived and traveled broadly, both as a traveler and a sportsman. Greece, Nepal, Tibet, Tasmania, Hungry, New Zealand, Slovenia, East Texas and the American West have, in different ways, touched his work. Concepts of place and places themselves are essential to his writing for what they speak of history and of the stories we keep. His half-acre in the far north is a good location for finding these things and for looking out of the kitchen window.

In her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging moments—bits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstones—and holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.

About the Author:
Kathleen Flenniken won the Washington State Book Award for her poetry collection Plume. Her first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014.

Winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award’s Gold Medal for Creativity & Innovation

In this fragmentary and fluent little gem, writer and time-based artist Marilyn Freeman offers up their own contemplative practice of dowsing for and creating “opportune moments” of insight and healing. With humor and humility, Freeman reveals their innovative approach to making video essays, a process developed over years of art-making, study and personal searching—a process of waking up again and again to the extraordinary possibilities hidden in everyday existence. Freeman introduces a theory of “evocative” practice as an alternative to the conventions of narrative and non-fiction filmmaking—a risky and rigorous engagement with form that invites the audience to participate in the creation of meaning. Their examination of the dialectical relationship of sound and image takes us far deeper than just a critical study of audio/visual media—deep into the human heart with its dark traumas and its shimmering capacity for honest and compassionate reckoning. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and trading authority for authentic inquiry, Freeman takes us with them on a foray into time-based art that leaps and wanders from movie theaters to museums to Instagram in search of the “illuminated spaces” where we encounter ourselves and each other. This book is an essential resource for artists who question the importance of their work in these dark times, and for anyone seeking wisdom and wonder in our ordinary world.

A Skeleton of Desire was published by Garron Publishing in October 2018 as part of their Southern-Land Poets Chapbook series.

It contains 10 poems that are mostly based on the human body in various ways – the organisation of the bones in the arms, their muscles, their development, dysfunction and recovery. Much of the imagery is derived from re-interpreting the original meanings of the latin names for body parts, diseases, and the environment they exist within.

Most of these poems have been previously published, with the five cardinal signs of inflammation and High Dependency originally appearing in the Medical Journal of Australia. Sensurious (Works on Paper) is derived from texts accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Judy Morris that were then used to create a video which was shortlisted for the Red Room Company / Royal Botanic Gardens New Shoots Poetry Prize, 2016. Dial Tone was awarded third place in the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize 2017. No Glutamate is based on a scientific paper published with Judy Morris and our colleagues about the underlying neural pathways mediating pain.

In Janae Johnson’s debut poetry collection, the concept of being tenderheaded is less about Black hair; more how we are taught to disguise pain through suppression of macro and micro traumas. What began as a book of poetry about women’s basketball transformed into a coming-of-age story centering Black queer masculinity, emotional restoration and belonging. From lyrically experimental to personified prose, each poem encourages humor to rise after an eight hour hair appointment and the ultimate decision to wear a ponytail.

About the Author:
Janae Johnson (she/her) is an award-winning poet, performer, educator, curator and DJ with a collection of work that celebrates Black queer masculinity, kinship, and belonging. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, and a founder of two nationally recognized poetry venues: The Root Slam (Oakland, CA) and The House Slam (Boston, MA). Her work has been featured in multiple outlets such as PBS NewsHour, ESPN, and FreezeRay Poetry.

An anthology of Black art, poetry, prose, scores, scripts and silences

This anthology is a poly-vocal, visually stunning answer to the question, What are the sounds of community and how they are handed down? A home for Black art and culture in Seattle’s Central District, with this anthology Wa Na Wari makes a home for the essays, poetry, scores, scripts and silences of the Black poets, musicians, artists and scholars assembled by editors Rachel Kessler and Elisheba Johnson to wonder about the time-traveling, place-making power of sound.

Contributors:

• Anastacia-Reneé (2021 Cadence Artist)
• Kamari Bright (2018, 2020 Cadence Artist & 2022 Cadence Artist-in-Residence)
• Thione Diop
• Mary Edwards
• Rachael F.
• Aricka Foreman
• Rell Be Free
• Amir George
• Chantal Gibson
• Walis Johnson
• JusMoni
• Anaïs Maviel
• Larry Mizell Jr.
• Okanomodé
• Christina Sharpe

The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.

As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?

The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice.

About the Author:
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize, and co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.

sanctified written by mu knowles 8×8 print

photo id: grey paper-textured background with various black flowers in three corners with a black box in the middle and words

santificada escrito por mu knowles traducido por haydeé lavariega 8×8 imprimir

photo id: papel gris texturizado con diferentes flores negras en las esquinas con un cuadro negro in la mitad con las palabras

Finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award

All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’ decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family―it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.

Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry. Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things, this wide-ranging and diverse collection contains poems that range from the lyric to the concrete/visual while confronting the pressing environmental issues of our time. Ardent, despairing, playful or political, Lam brings an eloquent tenderness to her depictions of our flawed but glorious world.

Sierra Nelson’s poems are hypotheses of the evanescent world – its evaporations and evasions, its silences and speeches. “All ears, all eyes, all senses at attention,” Nelson examines the tenuous tentacles that connect humans, plants, and animals, that tether us to the past – detailing the surreptitiousness of joy, the necessity of loss, how a body is changed by everything it encounters. Line by line The Lachrymose Report reveals how language, like feeling, originates deep in every cell, even as the wonder of these poems unfolds on an evolutionary scale.

About the Author:
Sierra Nelson’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, City Arts Magazine, Forklift, Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, and DIAGRAM, among others. For over a decade she has collaboratively written and performed as co-founder of The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society, including at the 2003 Venice Biennale and on the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington and is a MacDowell Colony fellow. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Loren and Sierra continue to collaborate under the name Invisible Seeing Machine.

Antípodas (a bilingual poetry collection in Spanish and English), a suitcase full of poems, a farmer’s dream, washing hung out, a murder in the midst of carnival, stories by the fireside, two pianists, art, painting, Venice, birds, aliens, women, nature – Antípodas takes us from the everyday to surreal moments, with touches of humour and mystery, without abandoning the sublime imagery characteristic of the author. Poet and artist Charles Olsen digs to the antipodes of his being to bring us visions of other worlds within our own. Unadorned, fresh and emotive poetry.

About the Author:
Charles Olsen (New Zealand, 1969) has lived in Spain since 2003. Artist, poet and filmmaker, his short film The Dance of the Brushes won second prize in the Flamenco Short Film Festival, Madrid, 2010, and his paintings have been shown in Madrid, Barcelona, Oporto, Paris, Wellington, and the Saatchi Gallery, London. He has published two poetry collections, Sr Citizen (2011) and Antípodas (2016). His poems and translations are included in NZ Poetry Yearbook, Landfall, Cordite Poetry Review, Blackmail Press and Neke.

In 2018 he was awarded the III Antonio Machado Poetry Fellowship of Segovia and Soria, and in 2017 the XIII distinction Poetas de Otros Mundos by the Fondo Poético Internacional in Spain. He has contributed essays to The Poetics of Poetry Film, (Ed. S. Tremlett, Intellect Books, 2021) and his essay on poetry film from Colombia is published in The London Magazine and in Spanish in WMagazín. His videopoems are featured in Moving Poems, Poetry Film Live, and Atticus Review.

Words in My Head expresses the experiences of love, sex and sadness and how each feeling revolves around one another. This book leads readers through the mixed feelings of a young boy who hides alone in a world unknown to those around him. His experiences living in various parts of Nigeria and eventually moving to New York City to find space for himself, gave birth to words expressed in captivating and thought-provoking poetry. Explore the thoughts of Ayodeji who discovers that the search for love and sex also leads to sadness and madness.

About the Author:
Ayodeji Otuyelu was born in Ogun State, Nigeria, but currently resides in New York City. At a young age, he started writing poems as an outlet for his overwhelming emotions but kept them a secret in his diary. After Ayodeji’s first publication Words in My Head, and also starring in a HBO documentary Legends Of The Underground, he began to explores making a visual representation of powerful poem from his book, poems that tell the stories of his childhood that he always try too hide of variety of themes ranging from love, sex, sadness, and the overall complexities of life. When he is not writing poems, fiction or making films. Ayodeji also enjoys modeling as another form of expression, celebrating African body through implied nudes and portraits.

“Adamantine bristles with taut, startling language that continues to yield surprises even after readers realize that they are at serious play within the fields of the human heart, a realm in which ‘we must know when to give in.'”–Carolyne Wright

“How wise of her to know that what is adamantine is the open heart. Fearless seeing, ancient mutterings on contemporary pathways and boulevards, inventive poetics, merciless memories and tender, knowing hands all take their proper place here.”—Peter Levitt

After decades of promoting the Chinese masters of poetry and Buddhist texts, Empty Bowl is honored to publish its first collection by a female Asian American author. Virga, Shin Yu Pai’s elegant eleventh collection of poems, is a crisp and intelligent response to recent and ancient history. In poems at once visionary and practical, Virga portrays Buddhist thought from lived experience, and demonstrates the everyday life of a poet who can see for herself in the “shafts of rain going sublime” the reality of being an Asian American woman in America today. This collection rediscovers who we are in an age when hate-crimes and terrorization destroy the lives of Asians and all people of color. Experiencing these poems, we witness Shin Yu Pai rise in and through the wearying atmosphere of the “dominant caste,” as historian Isabel Wilkerson calls white culture, to hold herself, her child, her community, in that sublime state that, within the Zen mind, arises “before touching the ground.”

“Bestial: una obra exuberante, carnal, llena de fuerza, que reclama el poder de lo femenino.” —Sonia Almoguera, Heraldo-Diario de Soria

Written in Spanish, Bestial is a book of wild nature connecting with the instinctive drive we carry within. Primal, carnal, fork-tongued and subversive, the author explores human passions with deeply personal vibrant poems where an animal force, eros embodied in feminine power and an ancestral mysticism transmit the most poetic bestiality. Read four poems from Bestial translated by Charles Olsen in Neke The New Zealand Journal of Translation Studies.

About the Author:
Lilián Pallares is a writer and actor from Barranquilla, Colombia. In 2017 she received the XIV distinction Poetas de Otros Mundos awarded by the Fondo Poético Internacional in Spain in recognition of the high quality of her poetic oeuvre. She has published the collection of short stories Ciudad Sonámbula (2010) and three poetry collections, Voces Mudas (2011), Pájaro, vértigo (2014) and Bestial (2019). Her passion for folklore, her African roots, and her love of the word lead her to create the theatrical company Afrolyrics, which unites poetry, dance, the oral storytelling tradition and world percussion. Their most recent show is Bestial ‘el espíritu de Lilith’.

Astra Papachristodoulou’s debut poetry collection Constellations is a sequence of 88 visual poems with games based on the 88 recognised astronomical constellations. Using collaged and found texts the artist weaves phrases and fragments through the stars, creating new patterns and ambiguities while inviting the reader to join in.

About the Author:
Astra Papachristodoulou is a poet and artist who has performed and exhibited internationally, including in Virginia, Athens, Vienna, Slovenia and at Kew Gardens. Her pamphlets and art books include Inside Ocean Größt’s Time Capsule (Penteract), Bunnies Behind Bars (KFS Press), Astropolis (Hesteglock Press) and another stellar Guillemot production, Stargazing. Astra is also the founder and curator of the publisher and exhibition platform Poem Atlas.

The author’s first poetry book, written in Montenegrin

This book of poetry problematizes the concealment, distortion of reality, but also not telling the truth, deception and self-deception. There are the two main thematic-motive cores of the book: 1) speech (language): pronunciation, communication, expression, power and impotence of language; 2) truth (lie): knowledge, attaining knowledge, cognition.

About the Author:
Jana Radičević, born 1997 in Podgorica, is a Montenegrin poet. She studied German language and literature at the University of Montenegro. She also studied German studies on universities in Marburg, Germany and Graz, Austria as an exchange student. Currently, she is a master’s student at the University of Würzburg in Germany. She is an active member of the Forum of Young Writers community, whose members have been assembling at the Cultural Information Centre Budo Tomović in Podgorica since 2015. Her first book of poetry “ako kažem može postati istina” (if said, it can become the truth) was published in 2019 by Partizanska knjiga from Serbia. Her poetry was translated in German, English, French, Macedonian, Albanian, Russian, Slovenian and Greek. She is a youngest holder of the literature scholarship Writer of the City of Graz for 2020/21.

Winner of the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award

Situated in Newark, New Jersey’s metropolitan landscape of multilingual communities, Reyes’ narrator, a street corner bard guided by the spirits of urban artists, takes us on a journey of language alternations. Each poem is a negotiation between life on the streets and the joyful and sometimes perilous quest for self-discovery. Traversing the desires of wanting to fit in, to get something, to say something in secret — Reyes’ eclectic poetic forms embody the duende, the cri de coeur, the hand-to-mouth hustle of urban life.

The poetry journal you never expected.

Shadow Work for Poets: Prompts to Guide Your Poetic Journey helps new, emerging, and long-time poets pay closer attention to each writerly decision making up the poet’s inner dialogue. Find value in this book of 60 poetry prompts with thought provoking questions like, “What are you scared to write about?” and “What’s the best advice you heard about being a poet? What’s the best advice you can give?”

This is the FIRST poetry book of it’s kind. Through the practice of introspective psychology better known as “shadow work,” this journal will be using those methods to “dig deep” and answer questions that help you understand what you write, why you write, and how you write.

About the Author:
Award-winning poet Dimitri Reyes has performed, taught, and facilitated workshops, lectures, and professional development courses across the United States both in-person and virtually. He has helped coach countless writers and performance artists across varying age groups. With his heart-first approach, he is now turning some of his teaching practices into helpful and easy-to-follow books. Shadow Work for Poets: Prompts to Guide Your Poetic Journey is his first.

Told through layered imagery and concrete poetry, Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer takes readers on a journey across the unsteady waters of healing after traumatic events and living with PTSD. In 250 pages, this artfully realized volume creates a robust, sand-castle world that readers will long to decode, to deconstruct, to dismantle.

About the Author:
Michèle Saint-Michel (she, her) is an experimental filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet whose work addresses environmental impermanence, womanhood, trauma, experiential time, memory and multi-temporalities. Her work has been an official selection at the Prismatic Ground Festival (NYC), Manchester International Film Festival (UK), Cadence Poetry Film Festival (Seattle), Dérapage Experimental Festival (Montreal), and others. In 2020, she published her first experiential art book, Grief is an Origami Swan. The book was followed in 2021 by her experimental poetry book, Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer.

In this brave and candid book, Michael V. Smith explores the experience of the modern working poor, with poems that look at sex, sexuality, and the sex trade in a straightforward manner, as well as a counterpoint of poems inspired by the American photographer William Gale Gedney, who documented the lives of the poor in Kentucky during the 1960s.

About the Author:
Michael V. Smith’s novel, Cumberland (Cormorant Books), was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His poetry has appeared in Arc, Descant, Grain, Quarry, and The Malahat Review, among others. What You Can’t Have is his first book of poetry.

He has won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, four awards for film,  a Community Heroes Award for his work in the arts in Vancouver, and was nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Michael was awarded the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Memorial Grant for LGBT Emerging Writers by The Writers’ Trust.

He curates the Robson Reading Series with Matt Rader and is a past organizer for Crash the Indie Writers Fest. Also a comedian, filmmaker, zinester, performance artist and occasional clown, Smith is an MFA grad from UBC’s Creative Writing program. He has been named one of Vancouver’s 25 most influential queer citizens (Vancouver Magazine) and one of Vancouver’s Most Dangerous People (Loop).

Ledi, the second book by Vancouver-based poet Kim Trainor, describes the excavation of an Iron Age Pazyryk woman from her ice-bound grave in the steppes of Siberia. Along with the woman’s carefully preserved body, with its blue tattoos of leopards and griffins, grave goods were also discovered—rosehips and wild garlic, translucent vessels carved from horn, snow-white felt stockings and coriander seeds for burning at death. The archaeologist who discovered her, Natalya Polosmak, called her ‘Ledi’—’the Lady’—and it was speculated that she may have held a ceremonial position such as story teller or shaman within her tribe.

Trainor uses this burial site to undertake the emotional excavation of the death of a former lover by suicide. This book-length poem presents a compelling story in the form of an archaeologist’s notebook, a collage of journal entries, spare lyric poems, inventories, and images. As the poem relates the discovery of Ledi’s gravesite, the narrator attempts simultaneously to reconstruct her own past relationship and the body of her lover.

About the Author:
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Ledi was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award. She lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.

LETTERS of INTENT is a collection of visual essays designed to explore the interior space of language material.

LETTERS of INTENT unfolds in chapters that investigate the methods, processes, manifestos and potentials of visual poetry.

LETTERS of INTENT attempts to blend the verbo-visual concept of reading seeing with the position that letters and their visual properties keep the germ of language afloat and operating while word formations are merely a convenience we’ve become accustomed to.

About the Author:
Nico Vassilakis is a visual and textual poet. His recent books include VOIR DIRE (Dusie Press 2020) and LETTERS of INTENT (CyberWit 2022) along with other pamphlets and booklets. Nico is a contributing editor for UTSANGA and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Illinois with his wife and animals.

With The Last Vispo Anthology, Fantagraphics spotlights the intersection of art and language in this innovative new collection — without peer in English — that gathers the work of visual poets from around the world into one stunning volume. The alphabet is turned on its head and inside-out and the results culminate in a compilation of daring and surprising verbo-visual gems.

The Last Vispo is composed of visual poetry (a portmanteau of the words “visual” and “poetry) from the years 1998 to 2008, during a burst of creative activity fueled by file sharing and e-mail, which made it possible for the vispo community to establish a more heightened and sophisticated dialogue with one another. The collection extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with ancient “shaped text,” medieval pattern poetry, and dada typography, pushing past the concrete poetics of the 1950s and the subsequent mail art movement of the 1980s to its current incarnation. Rather than settle into predictable, unchallenged patterns, this vibrant poetry seizes new tools to expand the body of work that inhabits the borderlands of visual art and poetic language. The Last Vispo features 148 contributors from 23 countries on five continents. It includes 12 essays that illuminate the abundant history and the state of vispo today. The anthology offers a broad amalgam of long-time practitioners and poets new to visual poetry over the last decade, underscoring the longevity and the continued vitality of the art form.

Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds is an urgent, meditative text of urban and rural language and landscapes. Its non-linear narrative moves between London’s Isle of Dogs and the Western Isles of Scotland and is both a topographical journey through two landscapes and a highly personal meditation on the history and geographies of these locations. The writing itself is a form of activism, memorialising eroded cultures through their physical traces and the stories and voices of their inhabitants.

First published by Test Centre in 2016 and republished in 2020, it is a text for and of our dissonant times.