Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Or see the index
“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.”
Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.”
She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.
These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is a 2021 NEA Literature Fellow. Their debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Poems
By torrin a. greathouse
Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Language: English
Paperback: 88 pages
ISBN-10: 1571315276
ISBN-13: 978-1571315274
Publish. Date: 12/22/2020
$16.00
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive G-H, Archive G-H
Winner of the 2022 Publish Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award. Finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.
A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty).
The poems in Ari Banias’s thrilling and discursive second collection, A Symmetry, unsettle the myth of a benevolently ordered reality. Through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, Banias contends with the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory in the architectures of daily experience.
Refusing the nostalgias of classicism and the trap of authenticity, these poems turn instead to a Greece of garbage strikes and throwaway tourist pleasures, where bad gender means bad grammar, and a California coast where mansions offer themselves to be crushed under your thumb.
A piece of citrus hurled into one poem’s apartment window rolls downhill and escapes the narrative altogether in another. Farmers destroy their own olive trees, strangers mesmerize us as they fold sheets into perfect corners, “artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they “leave politics out of it.’” Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins.
From within psychic interiors and iconic sites—the museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the sea—A Symmetry attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that “can be some other way. And is.”
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and the Nation, among other publications. He lives in Oakland, California.
Ari Banias:
A Symmetry
Poems
October 2021
Publishers: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0-393-86813-5
112 pages
Hardcover
$26.95
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B
Anything the Landlord Touches was Emma Lew’s second collection to be published in Australia.
The book won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry (the Victorian State Premier’s award for poetry), and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award (the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry), two of the main literary prizes in the country, and was also short-listed for The Age award and the NSW and South Australian Premier’s Literary Prizes.
Emma Lew lives in Melbourne. Her first collection of poems, The Wild Reply (1997), won the Mary Gilmore Award and was joint winner of the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her second collection, Anything the Landlord Touches (2002), won the Victorian Premier’s C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Queensland Premier’s Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry. A selection of German language translations of her poems by Mirko Bonne was published under the title Nesselgesang in 2008. Crow College: New and Selected Poems was published by Giramondo in 2019.
Anything the Landlord Touches
by Emma Lew
Poetry
Giramondo Publishing Australia
96 pages
Paperback
21 x 15 cm
2002
ISBN 0957831161
$22.00
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive K-L, Archive K-L
14 International Younger Poets, edited and with an introduction by Philip Nikolayev, features verse by brilliant poets aged under 35 from India and the United States, with two of the participants originally hailing from Eastern Europe.
These remarkable young men and women, who first met each other in a virtual poetry recital, have quickly formed an active poetic community held together by aesthetic affinities, like values, and camaraderie. Their styles and ideas exhibit a crosspollinating diversity, and their spirit is indomitably humanist.
The poets question both themselves and the world, constantly negotiating their human, moral, and literary standing in it. Welcome to fourteen captivating quests for poetic excellence!
Avinab Datta-Areng (India), Raquel Balboni (USA), Justin Burnett (USA), Blake Campbell (USA), Sumit Chaudhary (India), Zainab Ummer Farook (India), Emily Grochowski (Poland & USA), Chandramohan S. (India), Susmit Panda (India), Paul Rowe (USA), Shruti Krishna Sareen (India), Andreea Iulia Scridon (Romania & UK), Kamayani Sharma (India), Sam Wronoski (USA).
14 International Younger Poets
Edited and with introduction by Philip Nikolayev
MadHat Press
Imprint: Art and Letters
Language: English
Paperback, 154 pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-952335-23-5
$22.00
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, #More Poetry Archives, - Book News, Archive M-N
This is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos.
Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly & musically ecstatic, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn’s third collection of poems.
Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor & collagist living in Memphis. She is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009) and Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
Karyna holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Creative Writing & English Literature from the University of Houston. Recent honors include the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, a visiting professorship at Oberlin College, the Rumi Prize for Poetry selected by Cate Marvin, and the Florida Review Editors’ Award in Fiction. With Erika Jo Brown, she’s co-editing the anthology Clever Girl: Witty Poetry by Women.
50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
Karyna McGlynn
Publisher: Sarabande Books
April 26, 2022
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 194644894X
ISBN-13: 978-1946448941
€ 23,10
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive M-N, Archive M-N, Kate Bush
For more than 30 years, S corresponds with her first love, J.
There is one story she does not tell: one about three men and an alley. She learns a new story: one in which she is unable to leave the two blocks surrounding her house, and unable to tell J exactly what happened to her. Isolated by trauma and depression, S finds a way back into her skin through the strangers she meets online for sex.
The retellings of her adventures titillate J, who urges her on to more encounters. As in the 1001 Nights, this is a story made of stories: S’s own stories are interrupted and overwritten by similar, culturally reified stories. S’s life becomes scenes from everything from The Graduate and The Story of O to the words of Charles Manson and the Bible.
What emerges in words, invocations and collage is a grasping at presence and absence in the age of the internet: to be read in real time is life, and the blank screen is death.
San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author and editor of 10 books, most recently the short stories “Pretty Much Dead. She is also the author of five books of poetry, two anthologies, and a graphic novel with artist Diane DiMassa. She is also the co-editor (with Lisa Kester) of Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, letters from the “First Female Serial Killer” from Death Row to her childhood best friend.
She is the winner of the Acker Award, the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and a five-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Gottlieb teaches graduate-level creative writing, and has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at all levels around the country. She received her MFA from Mills College.
Saint 1001
by Daphne Gottlieb
Publisher: MadHat Press
2021
Language: English
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN-10: 1952335256
ISBN-13: 978-1952335259
$21.95
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive G-H, Archive G-H
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive S-T, Archive S-T
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, #Modern Poetry Archive, - Book News, - Book Stories, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, LITERARY MAGAZINES
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive O-P, Archive O-P
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book Lovers, Archive K-L, Archive K-L
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, LITERARY MAGAZINES, Magazines
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
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R
Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature