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From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.
Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.
In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community—and seemingly life as we know it—becomes more and more uncertain.
Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.
Heather Sellers is the author of four poetry collections: Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA, 2022); The Present State of the Garden (Lynx House Press, 2021); The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta Press, 2002). She is also the author of the memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead, 2011), which was an O, the Oprah Magazine Book of the Month Club Choice and an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times, and the craft book The Practice of Creative Writing (Macmillan St. Martins Bedford, 2021), now in its fourth edition.
Her writing has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Best American Essays, Creative Nonfiction, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Reader’s Digest, The Sun, and Tin House. She has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at The MacDowell Colony. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. A native Floridian, she divides her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and Manhattan.
Field Notes from the Flood Zone
By Heather Sellers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (April 26, 2022)
Language: English
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-10: 1950774570
ISBN-13 : 978-1950774579
$ 17.00
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No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: “I, too, dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore.
“Many more people agree they hate poetry,” Ben Lerner writes, “than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.”
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato‘s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others.
Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard, and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry),and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner
Publisher: FSG Originals
First Edition (June 7, 2016)
Language : English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10 : 0865478201
ISBN-13 : 978-0865478206
$ 8.99
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers—John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust—to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith, recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
by Maya C. Popa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 8, 2022)
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Price $26.95
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Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language.
The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain.
At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea—Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Deaf Republic
Poems
by Ilya Kaminsky
Publisher: Graywolf 2019
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 1555978312
ISBN-13 : 978-1555978310
Paperback $10.79
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A fascinating blend of poetry and science, Ben-Oni’s poems are precisely crafted, like a surgeon sewing a complicated stitch, moving through the multiverses of family, religion and discovery itself.
The book culminates in an ancient Jewish Idea about “Efes,” which is Modern Hebrew for “zero” but also in mystical texts, means “nullification” and “concealment.”
Ultimately, Efes becomes a process of transformation for the speaker, revealing as well that the closer humanity gets to understanding this mysterious force, it inevitably changes the riddle– and us along with it.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019).
She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal ,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others.
Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Rosebud Ben-Oni writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She is currently editing a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
If This Is the Age We End Discovery
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Publisher: Alice James Books (March 9, 2021)
Language: English
Poetry
Paperback: 100 pages
ISBN-10 : 1948579154
ISBN-13 : 978-1948579155
$14.89
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Gustave Roud, perhaps the most beloved poet of Swiss Romandy, is widely considered the founder of modern francophone Swiss literature, along with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz.
Roud lived at his grandfather’s farm in Carrouge, Canton Vaud, for his entire life. In Air of Solitude, the first section of this two-part book, he stalks the structures and fields of his youth, composing memories out of his landscape.
The narrator appears homegrown, expressing nostalgia for what is already in front of him. Yet, like an outsider, he remains distinctly elsewhere, unable to participate in the workday rituals of the men around him—a stalking shadow of unfulfilled yearning for affection and belonging. Air of Solitude explores the rural bodies and lives of the Vaudois, returning again and again to the desired male laborer Aimé.
Between each section of Air of Solitude, Roud inserts short vignettes that provide fleeting and lyrical images that resemble allusions to half-forgotten memories. However, Roud leaves the relationship between the titled sections and the interludes ambiguous.
As the book concludes with Requiem, the remnants of narrative shatter, leaving behind only the spectral tatters of memory as Roud confronts the enigma of loss in peerless, jewel-studded elegiac prose. With these two tales, Roud revives the pastoral tradition and injects it with distinctly modernist anxiety and disillusionment.
‘Gustave Roud made all of French-speaking Switzerland dream poetically upon itself, the land that welcomed European Romanticism from Rousseau to Byron, from Lamartine to Shelley. His poetry could seem idyllic, sustained by an ethereal figure of constantly conflicted desires (more or less unspeakable, always displayed), and a moral, sacrificial figure inspired, above all, by Novalis and Hölderlin.’—Antonio Rodriguez, University of Lausanne
Gustave Roud (1897–1976) was a major Swiss poet and photographer whose neoromantic poetic prose influenced a generation of poets including Maurice Chappaz and Philippe Jaccottet. His works include Ecrits (1950) and Campagne perdue (1972). He also translated German writers including Rilke, Hölderlin and Novalis.
Gustave Roud
‘Air of Solitude’ Followed by ‘Requiem’
Translated by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds
ISBN: 9780857426871
Pages: 172
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: 2020
Format: Hardback
Size: 5″ x 8″
Publisher: Seagull Books
£16.99
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The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, the volume widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of this period of radical thought and practice.
The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977.
Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced.
The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.
Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019) was an Italian poet, experimental writer, visual artist and founding member of both the avant-garde Gruppo ’63 and the revolutionary organization Potere Operio.
Primo Moroni (1936–1998) was an Italian writer, activist and archivist. Founder of the Calusca bookshop in Milan, for decades he was a point of reference for radical movements and subcultures across Italy.
Richard Braude lives in Palermo, Italy. His translations include works by Nanni Balestrini, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri and Rossana Rossanda.
The Golden Horde
Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977
by Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni
Translated by Richard Braude
ISBN: 9780857427465
Pages: 690
Publication Year: May 2021
Size: 6″ x 9″
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Seagull Books
£35
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Geluksvogels bevat een keuze uit Luigi Pirandello’s Novellen voor een jaar, in een blinkend nieuwe vertaling van Yond Boeke en Patty Krone.
Pirandello schreef deze opmerkelijk hoogwaardige verzameling verhalen tussen 1894 en 1936. Zijn dood belette hem het project – één novelle voor elke dag van het jaar – te voltooien.
De diversiteit van zijn verhalen, die getuigen van groot psychologisch inzicht, een buitengewoon scherp gevoel voor humor en immens mededogen, is exemplarisch voor Pirandello’s enorme veelzijdigheid als schrijver.
Hij voert een breed scala aan markante personages ten tonele: van arme Siciliaanse boeren die tevergeefs strijden tegen de clerus tot wufte stedelingen die verstrikt raken in hun eigen overspel, van een wanhopige patiënt die in een New Yorks ziekenhuis uit het raam springt tot een geëxalteerde actrice die het moet opnemen tegen een vleermuis.
Pirandello laveert virtuoos tussen vlotte dialogen, van weemoed doortrokken landschapsbeschrijvingen en filosofische bespiegelingen over het aardse bestaan. Sommige verhalen blijken ook nu nog verrassend actueel.
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), geboren in een gegoede familie op Sicilië, kreeg in 1934 de Nobelprijs voor de Literatuur. De verfilming van zijn verhalen door Paolo en Vittorio Taviani, Kaos, werd wereldberoemd.
Geluksvogels
Novellen
Door Luigi Pirandello
Uitgeverij Van Oorschot
2022
Gebonden
832 pagina’s
ISBN 9789028213142
Prijs: € 45,00
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To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage.
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents 73 of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-colour reproductions of the originals.
Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in colour, font and type size.
Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.
Herta Müller was born in a German-speaking community in western Romania in 1953. She published her first collection of short stories in 1982. In 1987, she left Romania for West Berlin, where she continued to write and publish. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Herta Müller
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies
A Selection
Translated by Thomas Cooper
ISBN: 9781803090450
Pages: 200 pages
73 colour plates
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Rights: UCP
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£11.99
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To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical.
To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season.
This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.
Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.
This Alaska
by Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
15 september 2021
Poetry
English
Paperback
76 pages
ISBN-10: 1945588926
ISBN-13: 978-1945588921
€ 21,36
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An evening of poetry and art with celebrated local author Vincent Berquez.
Vincent Berquez is an Anglo-French Balham based artist and poet. He has exhibited his artwork worldwide and is published in Britain, Europe, America and New Zealand.
Vincent will be reading from his latest book, ‘The Sound of Blossom Falling’.
Thu, 15 September 2022
19:00 – 21:00 BST
Location
Balham Library
16 Ramsden Road
London
SW12 8QY
United Kingdom
more information on website:
https://allevents.in/london/meet-author-and-artist-vincent-berquez/10000394228948397
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Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome.
Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance.
His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light.
Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna’s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life.
There is something ancient in Penna’s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile.
Penna’s city is eternal—a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound—from Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire to Leopardi, D’Annunzio, Cavafy—the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna’s own.
Sandro Penna (1906–77) was an Italian poet. During his life, he was awarded two of Italy’s most important literary awards, the Premio Viareggio and the Premio Bagutta. His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, and has appeared in numerous anthologies of Italian poetry.
Alexander Booth is a writer and translator and the recipient of a 2012 PEN Translation Fund grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler.
Sandro Penna
Within the Sweet Noise of Life
Selected Poems
Translated by Alexander Booth
ISBN: 9780857427878
Format: Hardback
Pages: 96
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: March 2021
Size: 5″ x 8.5″
Publisher: Seagull Books
$19.00
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