“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.

Get this book for free from me. Find @chrisbernstorf on any social media & DM me to see if I have any copies I can send you (and/or copies of my other books as well). Buy it if you want, but have it as a gift if you want. All of my work is for free, and I’d love to share it with you 🙂 This book is love poems and also suffering and wrestling and hope-finding and starts with a big FUCK YOU to doubt, all caps, full stop. I hope it points you to truth & beauty, which might just be one and the same. I don’t know for sure—I’m no scientist.

About the Author:
The elevator pitch for my poetry is something like: “If Matthew Dickman and Pablo Neruda conceived a child while crowdsurfing at a punk show and then raised the newborn in one of those bio tubes from a sci-fi movie, amalgamating the pseudo-amniotic-fluid from church, Chipotle, and pop culture, then you’d have something akin to my poetry.” That’s too long, and the elevator would likely reach its destination before I finished that sentence (or this one), but it’s roughly in the ballpark. I’ve performed nearly 600 shows in 48 states & 6 other countries. My poetry videos have been official selections at fests in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. There’s a few other accolades rattling around, too, but the jist is that I fuck with Jesus, punk rock, and the power of art to bridge otherwise impossible-to-cross gaps between people. My wife and I would rather be sleeping on your floor after a house show and some good ol’ fashioned late-night-kitchen-table-heart-to-hearting-with-strangers-fast-becoming-friends than almost anywhere else in the world. We believe art belongs to everyone, so we give all of my art away for free. We hope the art we make invites people to join arms with us and gaze at the Light at the center of it all. We’re also really into stage dives, even (perhaps especially) to poetry. 😉

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.

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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.

In a short collection of poems about dreams, Stephanie Borges observes how images and language can create experiences of freedom for Black women. In her verses, individual and collective experiences are evoked by voices that dissolve and blur the boundaries of the self. The tension between body and language emerges among the many possible meanings of a dream. As an element of waking life, imagination blends with daily tasks, because a dream is also something that demands work, dedication and choices, just like writing.

About the Author:
Stephanie Borges (1984) is a poet and translator. She lives in Rio de Janeiro. She has translated works by Claudia Rankine, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Margaret Atwood and Jericho Brown into Brazilian Portuguese. Her first poetry collection, Talvez precisemos de um nome para isso (Maybe We Need a Name for This), received the IV Prêmio Cepe Nacional de Literatura.

About the Translator:
Livia Azevedo Lima (1989) is a multimedia editor and essayist with a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of São Paulo. She lives in Seattle. Alongside her editorial work, she curates the Travessias—Brazilian Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum and coordinates the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop.

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.

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.

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Publication of the full dramaturgy of the play of the same name, directed by Vinicius Arneiro and acted by Renato Livera. In a monologue-conference, a subject strives to decolonize both his way of thinking and thought itself, as a universal concept. Through countless relationships woven in the linguistic exercise and deconstruction of thinking, the narrator-character takes us to the absurd, while at the same time moving us with the palpability of his words. Colônia [Colony] was elected one of the three best plays of 2018 in the city of São Paulo. She was nominated for best dramaturgy by the APCA Award. The lecture-performance was a success with the public and critics, integrating important performing arts circuits in Brazil and abroad, such as the Santiago Off Festival, in Chile and FITEI – Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica, in Portugal.

About the Author:
Gustavo Colombini (São Paulo, 1990, lives in Lisbon) is a playwright and theater director graduated from the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP). The relationship with research and dramaturgy emerged early in his artistic career, adding several publications and professional distinctions, such as «Colônia», published by GLAC Edições and nominated for the APCA award (Associação Paulista de Créticos de São Paulo) in the category for Best Dramaturgy and «The silence after rain», published by SESI-SP Editora and nominated for the São Paulo Shell award in the Best Author category. Together with playwright João Turchi, he is responsible for the gray group <grupocinza.com.br>, a multi-artistic collective that has performed at several festivals, such as Atos de Fala (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), EnArtes (Sucre and La Paz, Bolivia) and MEXE (Porto and Lisbon, Portugal). He was a resident artist at the Perphoto laboratory, hosted by the Theater Studies Center of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon (CET-FLUL), where he created the conference «We never went to the moon» (2022), selected for the Raia residency, in the space Alkantara (Lisbon, Portugal) and the TBFB festival, at Teatro da Garagem (Lisbon, Portugal). His artistic work also extends to the fields of literature, visual arts and video, such as the book «Stories to be read aloud» (2015), published independently and selected for the 11th Brazilian Biennial of Graphic Design in Rio de Janeiro; the performance-installation «Chart Cake», carried out at the Nowhere space (Lisbon, Portugal) and the video-essay «Post-performance». Since 2023, he has coordinated and written the art criticism magazine «Esse texto», alongside playwright Diogo Liberano. He is also an associate editor of Espaço.CC, having edited books and catalogs for several cultural institutions, such as Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Galeria Almeida & Dale, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, Center for Theater Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, among others. He has already taught workshops and courses on dramaturgy and experimental writing in various cultural spaces in Brazil, as well as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Portugal.

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.

Ceremony for the Choking Ghost is a collection that goes into the depths of grief and its impact on the body, memory, and the world around us.

After a haunting silence following the loss of her sister, Karen’s voice returns with a resounding intensity, whispering at first and then soaring like a scream. With each poem, she exorcises her emotions, transforming half of the book into a powerful ritual of healing.

Prepare to be swept away by the enchanting verses that grace the pages of “Ceremony for the Choking Ghost.” These words are not confined to the realm of personal loss; they possess an extraordinary ability to resonate with the very essence of human emotions, whether you’ve personally experienced loss or simply cherish the exploration of love and life’s most profound moments.

About the Author:
Karen Finneyfrock is the author of two young adult novels: The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door and Starbird Murphy and the World Outside, both published by Viking Children’s Books and both selected for the Junior Library Guild Award. She is one of the editors of the poetry anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls and the author of Ceremony for the Choking Ghost, both released on Write Bloody press. She is a former Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle and teaches for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers-in-the-Schools program. She currently teaches the Yearlong Class in Young Adult Fiction at Hugo House and has taught the Certificate Program in Young Adult Fiction at University of Washington. Karen has received residencies at Hedgebrook, Bloedel Reserve, and Helen R. Whiteley Center. She has received grants from The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture and Artist Trust.

The first full-length poetry collection by Amber Flame.

About the Author:
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture’s CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House’s 2017–2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Flame’s work featured in Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She is Program Director for Hedgebrook, a residency for women-identified writers. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy in Tacoma, Washington, who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.

APOCRIFA is a nongendered love story told in verse, the journey of a lover and their beloved finding each other, falling apart, and then creating their own way to love together.

APOCRIFA imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough/to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting us into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.

About the Author:
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture’s CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House’s 2017–2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Flame’s work featured in Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She is Program Director for Hedgebrook, a residency for women-identified writers. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy in Tacoma, Washington, who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.

♡−shaped−☐, a micro-chapbook, was published as part of Ghost City Press’ 2022 Summer Series and printed by Bottlecap Press. Its poems and photographs wander through a coastal love language alongside a very special person…

About the Author:
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is a dancer, filmmaker, poet, and author of ♡−shaped−☐ (Ghost City Press, 2022) and through Eileeen, a young-adult novella from VerbalEyze Press, 2020. Her video poems have been published in TriQuarterly, Pinky Thinker Press and exhibited at Drawing Room SF, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, and 92nd Street Y.

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.

With humor and humility, M Freeman reveals their innovative approach to making video essays and poems, 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.

About the Author:
Writer and media artist M Freeman is author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (Winner of the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Creativity & Innovation, The 3rd Thing, 2020); and creator of Cinema Divina—short personal films made through and for creative contemplative practice. M’s films have been featured on PBS, in galleries, spirituality centers, theaters, and festivals worldwide.

Forthcoming September 2023!

Good Symptom troubles the boundaries between literature and cinema. Subscribe for a whole year of extraordinary short films. Curators M Freeman, Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke have watched more than 700 films from over 80 countries to bring you this hand-picked selection of the most innovative, thought-provoking, beautiful, memorable work you won’t find gathered anywhere else.

Released to subscribers in 12 monthly installments, every “episode” of Good Symptom features 1-4 short films that push the language of poetry, essay, memoir, manifesto and hybrid literature off the page and onto the screen + curatorial insights, filmmaker interviews and links to bonus content.

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 Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire.

About the Author:
Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. In 2014, Rebecca was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018. Rebecca’s third full-length collection, Girl, was published with Carcanet/Northern House in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD by Publication from the University of East Anglia. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge 2020-22 and at the University of Suffolk 2022-23.

In Far Company, we hear Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. We hear conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman, and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan’s poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers. The poems in Far Company reveal a mind and a heart negotiating both self and world with compassion and invention. They are cinematic in the way they navigate loss, memory, dislocation, hope, and love—abstractions evoked in deeply specific and nuanced ways.

About the Author:
Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of Far Company (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and Harborless (Wayne State University Press), which was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. She also is the author of two chapbooks, Apple Season (Midwest Writing Center Chapbook Award, 2012) and The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker (Ledge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Michigan State University and is a co-founder of FILMETRY: A Festival of Poetry and Film.

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, 2024 Cadence Collaborator)
• 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.

Two poetic prose narratives converge in The Inevitable by Jade Lascelles to explore what it means to be a vulnerable body living in a hard, violent world. The diptych asks us to lean in close to examine the crossroads; how might we romanticize brutality? How might we respond to being invaded? What is the unavoidable or the inevitability of certain trajectories?

poems, often concerning accidents of known or unknown nature

About the Author:
Georg Leß was born 1981 in Arnsberg, Germany. He lives in Berlin. In 2014 he received the GWK Promotion Prize for Literature, 2016 the Promotion Prize of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia for young artists. Poetry collections: Schlachtgewicht (2013 parasitenpresse), die Hohlhandmusikalität (2019 kookbooks). Selected poems were translated in various languages.

The Fabulous Dead is a collection of un-historical fiction, a type of literature that deals with the undoing of history and its reweaving into surreal fables. Famous and fabulous dead characters find themselves in dream-like situations that influence the living in unexpected ways. Brahms is having telephone troubles and is a sauerkraut addict, Marlene Dietrich lives in an ice-cream freezer, Gus Grissom has a secret affair with Dante’s Beatrice, and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Kane and Sylvia Plath drink bloody Marys in the living room. This book is an intricate mosaic of identity, individuality, and lives wasted or enjoyed. The Fabulous Dead is, perhaps above all, a ball-masque oscillating between the eternal and the ephemeral.

About the Author:
Andriana Minou writes poetry and fiction in Greek and English and her work has been published by Strange Days Books, poetix, Entefktirio, eyelands, Mandragoras, chimeres, codepoetry (Greece), Story Brewhouse, FIVE:2:ONE magazine, typehouse magazine, Maintenant Dada (U.S.A.), The Paper Nautilus, rattle journal (U.K.), Sand Journal (Berlin), anti-languorous (Canada) and more. Her latest book, ‘The Fabulous Dead’ was released in March 2020 by Kernpunkt Press (New York). You may also read an interview by Andriana for Reading Greece here.

In Departure, Samuel Miranda depicts a world in which history is bought and sold with an aversion of the truth. In his exquisite debut collection, Miranda journeys through the effects of displacement and forced migration on one’s ability to be at home in one’s skin and language. At the heart of every poem is a labyrinth, a resounding set of questions about entrances and exits for which, as Jorge Luis Borges writes, “there’ll never be a door.” When Miranda writes “In time empty rooms became an empty house/that did not mourn absence/but crumbled under the weight of vacancy” the breadth and depth of Departure is unequivocal. This book is a must have and every poem a must read

About the Author:
Samuel “Sami” Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. He is a visual artist, poet, and teacher. He is the author of Protection from Erasure, published by Jaded Ibis Press, Departure, a chapbook published by Central Square Press, and We Is, published by Zozobra Publishing. He is currently working on collaborative projects with musicians, visual artists and filmmakers. Samuel’s artwork has been exhibited internationally in Puerto Rico and Madrid, as well as New York and Washington, DC. Most recently, Samuel’s artwork has been included in the Smithsonian’s new Molina Family Latino Gallery inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! His artwork has been included in university and private collections. Films he co-produced and co-directed, “Hiding Place”, “Desert Poems” and “Spanish Joe Remembers” have been included in film festivals in DC, Berlin, the Netherlands, Madrid, Houston, Bethesda, Seattle and Milwaukee.

In this poetry collection, Samuel Miranda aims to capture and celebrate a life lived and lives encountered. Through observations and conversations, we’re reminded that mundane events and minute moments in our everyday lives can and should be memorialized. Part portraiture, part social commentary, and part memory, Protection from Erasure is meticulously crafted with arresting dialogue, sincere lines, and raw reflections that knit together and hover upon the edge of a shared remembrance.

About the Author:
Samuel “Sami” Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. He is a visual artist, poet, and teacher. He is the author of Protection from Erasure, published by Jaded Ibis Press, Departure, a chapbook published by Central Square Press, and We Is, published by Zozobra Publishing. He is currently working on collaborative projects with musicians, visual artists and filmmakers. Samuel’s artwork has been exhibited internationally in Puerto Rico and Madrid, as well as New York and Washington, DC. Most recently, Samuel’s artwork has been included in the Smithsonian’s new Molina Family Latino Gallery inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! His artwork has been included in university and private collections. Films he co-produced and co-directed, “Hiding Place”, “Desert Poems” and “Spanish Joe Remembers” have been included in film festivals in DC, Berlin, the Netherlands, Madrid, Houston, Bethesda, Seattle and Milwaukee.

The poetry in Sami Miranda’s We Is cuts deep. In it Miranda establishes himself as master storyteller whose precise and profound work stiches together feats of resilience, resistance, and joy. The poet in this collection is a messenger; his voice preaches the reader into communion with the everyday yet legendary characters that populate his world. That world becomes ours, with each page we turn. Our witnessing of these lives, captured so well by his attention and empathy, and portrayed so clearly with an almost musical truth, fills the reader with a compassion that ultimately dignifies the struggle of so many around us.

About the Author:
Samuel “Sami” Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. He is a visual artist, poet, and teacher. He is the author of Protection from Erasure, published by Jaded Ibis Press, Departure, a chapbook published by Central Square Press, and We Is, published by Zozobra Publishing. He is currently working on collaborative projects with musicians, visual artists and filmmakers. Samuel’s artwork has been exhibited internationally in Puerto Rico and Madrid, as well as New York and Washington, DC. Most recently, Samuel’s artwork has been included in the Smithsonian’s new Molina Family Latino Gallery inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! His artwork has been included in university and private collections. Films he co-produced and co-directed, “Hiding Place”, “Desert Poems” and “Spanish Joe Remembers” have been included in film festivals in DC, Berlin, the Netherlands, Madrid, Houston, Bethesda, Seattle and Milwaukee.

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.

In 2018, Charles Olsen received the III Antonio Machado Poetry Fellowship of Segovia and Soria. He spent a month in each place, doing workshops and talks in schools and with the local community groups, visiting local villages, walking in the countryside, and getting to know the people and places that infuse Antonio Machado’s poetry. As well as poems inspired by these experiences Rebellious Sun includes a selection of poems by other writers in Spain and New Zealand from special editions of the Given Words project Charles runs, and finishes with poems inspired by a line found in Machado’s overcoat after his death ‘These blue days and this sun of childhood’, which in Charles’ case took him back to his own childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand.

All the poems are printed in both Spanish and English, however the introduction to the collection is only in Spanish.

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.

“I believe in everything Pongo does. The happy contagion which springs from telling one’s own true story, writing one’s own thoughts, and following the trail of imagination, continues to pass from person to person as a healing gift. Listen to these brave, beautiful voices and feel fortified on your own trail.”

– Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, novelist, and four-time Pushcart Prize winner

About the Project:
Pongo Poetry Project’s mission is to engage youth in writing poetry to inspire healing and growth. Pongo is a Seattle-based nonprofit that engages systems-impacted youth in therapeutic poetry writing, to facilitate healing from trauma including abuse, neglect, racism, and exposure to violence. Pongo has developed an approach to help youth write about painful life experiences – often for the first time – in a way that promotes insight and healing. Pongo envisions a world where all youth who have experienced childhood trauma can be seen, heard, and affirmed in their full humanity; where youth have the support, resources, and tools they need to heal, grow, and lead dignified lives.

“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.”

A full-length collection of poetry comics from poet Shin Yu Pai and artist Justin Rueff

Blue Cactus Press is making a haiku comic book with multidisciplinary artists Shin Yu Pai and Justin Rueff! You might know Shin Yu Pai from her work as a poet, public artist, curator, and public radio podcast host in Seattle. Justin Rueff, the illustrator, is a comics artist from rural Oregon.

Together, Shin Yu and Justin are hard at work creating haiku comics, an emerging literary artform. They’re collaborating with Blue Cactus Press to bring their innovative work to life this fall, in the form of Less Desolate, a book of deeply imaginative haiku comics.

As a creative team, we want to make Less Desolate exquisite for you, complete with an introduction from haiku comics artist David Lasky, an author and artist interview with Shin Yu and Justin, and over 108 full-page haiku comics in vibrant colors.

To do that, we need your support!

“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.

Van Petten created For Someone in Port Townsend, Washington where they sampled sounds, wrote music, and recorded poetry in residence with Centrum at Fort Worden. The tape is available for purchase online via Hello America Stereo Cassette, or at The Vera Project’s cassette tape vending machine.

About the Author:
K. Van Petten (they/them) is a poet and musician based in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. You can find their music wherever you listen under ‘Baddy Gold’ and their poems in zines floating around Seattle coffee shops. Their debut audiobook was released on cassette tape with Hello America Stereo Cassette, and their debut EP of music with a new project releases on Dance Cry Dance in 2023. They currently work for local coffee roaster Caffe Vita, and local poetry magazine Poetry Northwest. @joni_witchell

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater / Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La Nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos is a trilingual collection by one of the most prominent Indigenous poets in Latin America, Irma Pineda, set in the poet’s hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca. Author Ilan Stavans writes, “Irma Pineda’s extraordinary collection—in resonant Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish, lucidly translated into precise English by Wendy Call—surveys the echoes of a universal journey across space, time, and language. We are in the hands of a consummate poet through whose vision an entire civilization comes alive.”

About the Author:
Irma Pineda is the author of twelve books of bilingual Didxazá/Spanish poetry. From 2020 through 2022 she served as Vice President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, one of two representatives for all the Indigenous peoples of Latin America.

About the Translator:
Wendy Call translated Irma Pineda’s In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, published in 2022 by Pluralia/Eulalia, and wrote the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (Nebraska, 2011).

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.

Photo-book. Photos taken during solitary photowalks. Walks for no apparent reason, with no intended purpose. Point and shoot. Rationalise later. Text is free verse—of the flow of consciousness kind.

About the Author:
Robert Rado has been an intense observer and an unrelenting urban walker, taking photos along the way. Some pictures made it to exhibitions, most sit on hard disks. Robert exhibited in Rome (solo), Athens (collective) and Brussels (solo). He published a photo-book, edited by filmmaker Patricia Delso Lucas, see link below. Writing for Robert is not unlike taking photos, when an image cannot be captured by a camera he makes an attempt to render it through words. He’s currently preparing his new exhibition in Brussels. Co-founder of More Upstairs, a non-profit promoting audio-visual arts, literature and poetry.

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.

Sunbled is a hybrid work of prose poetry and lyric that follows a narrator through a drug-streaked terrain of malibu, european train rides, danish prison, and 16mm film screenings. The text challenges contours of autotheory and narrative through a meditation on grief and the process of recovery.

About the Author:
Sabrina Rubakovic is a writer and visual artist. She holds a BA from Duke University, and was the recipient of a State Department graduate fellowship in arabic and visual poetics. Her work has been featured in The Margins, Electronic Literature Organization Peripheries Festival, Barnard Feminist Film Series, and Bridges International Film Festival.

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.

About the Author:
Juan Garrido Salgado emigrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the regime that burned his poetry and imprisoned and tortured him for his political activism. He has published five books of poetry and his work have been widely translated. Juan has also translated the works of several leading Australian poets, including John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, Judith Beveridge, Dorothy Porter, and MTC Cronin, into Spanish.

What News, Centurions? is a collection of contemporary poetry by award-winning Irish author, Colm Scully.

About the Author:
Colm Scully is a poet and poetryfilm maker from Cork, Ireland.He won the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Prize in 2022.

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).

Phenomenal Woman: I Am Not OK is a poetic reflection of the author’s emotional journey of struggle and triumph after losing everything, of her finally finding the courage to come out of hiding and own that she is not ok.

About the Author:
Sasha Marie Speer uses a variety of materials and processes to investigate, break apart and reconfigure how we connect to ourselves and each other. Through her provoking and powerful studio sessions in photography, video and audio she harnesses the soul of her subjects and creates experiences from them in her work. She interweaves pain and hope into visual forms and experiences to capture and challenge our current state as human beings and seeks possibility of real connection in a world of constant distraction and separation.

These poems anchor The Fire Cycle — a multidisciplinary project of poetry, music, film, visual art, dance, and live performance. Taken together, the poems, music, and other work focus on a return to nature and the elemental, a reconnection to ritual and community, and a gentle acceptance of impermanence. To learn more, visit www.thefirecycle.com.

About the Author:
Clay Steakley‘s writing has been published alongside Aimee Bender and Lauren Groff in Slake, as well as in Cathexis Northwest Press, Fiction Fix, From the Depths, and Waxing & Waning. He was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship, and received the Ruby P. Treadway award for creative writing. He was a 2020/21 OZ Arts Art/Porch Art Wire Fellow, and is the founding editor of the online arts journal Outer Voice. Over the years, he’s been a professional actor, musician, and journalist, as well as a semi-professional napper. He lives in Nashville, where he was born a long time ago.

Dao Strom’s Instrument/Traveler’s Ode is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of “voice”. Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom’s life and work speaks to fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places—yet within this configuring lies her art’s fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography and gripping, restless poetry, Instrument represents a unique melding of literature and art.

The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler’s Ode, an interwoven series of textured, ethereal song-poems. Atmospheric yet weighted, minimalist yet lush, the album combines voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores themes of displacement, diaspora, and hauntings.

About the Author:
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). Her works also include interdisciplinary music/poetry performance, public art, and visual-poetry installations. She received a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship and a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award. Her work has received support also from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Precipice Fund/Warhol Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

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.

A story of a new birth that burns beyond generational trauma.

About the Author:
Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the award-winning author of Green Ink Wings, The Name is Perilous, and Flame Nebula, Bright Nova. Sherre has been published in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. She teaches creative writing for the Downtown Writers Center at the YMCA of Central New York and composition at Merced College.

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.