Exhibits

John Yau

"Why make a spectacle of yourself when lightning strikes us all?" 22 pages with cover art by Squeak Carnwath. Out of print, but you can buy John Yau's Bijoux in the Dark from Small Press Distribution here.

Bijoux in the Dark

John Yau

New poems from John Yau released in April of 2018.  At the conclusion of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, John Yau states, "I did not write a hauntingly beautiful book." A line that contrasts with the book's introductory poem, in which hauntings and beauty abound. With all of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, the answer is multifaceted as Yau disavows pretension and expectation and instead heeds a candor beyond categorization. Sonnets and pantoums abound alongside graffiti and Top Ten lists. Yau's work veers from satire, ekphrasis, and homage to imagined histories, surreal dimensions, and Egyptology. The book's list of characters includes Albrecht Durer,…

Another Random Heart

Sara Veglahn

This prose-poem sequence opens with the following sentence: "Scenes left on the cutting room floor flower into their own scenery." Such an auspiciously suggestive start functions as a distillation of the book’s prismatic echo chamber, where painterly lyricism and narrative probing converge within each musically astute sentence. This is a symphony of partial happenings, ghostly movements, and investigatory ruminations, a stroll through an exhibit of paintings that seem to stare back at the viewer: captivating, gorgeous, and just a little bit scary. Order from Small Press Distribution here.

Evening Oracle

Brandon Shimoda

Winner of the 2016 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, EVENING ORACLE is composed of poems originally handwritten at night before sleep in the beds of friends and strangers in Japan (2011-2012), and passages from emails and letters to and from friends and family on the subjects of fruit, vegetables, and dying grandparents. Featuring original poems by Dot Devota and Hiromi Itō, and correspondence by Etel Adnan, Don Mee Choi, Phil Cordelli, Youna Kwak, Quinn Latimer, Mary Ruefle, Rob Schlegel, and Karen McAlister Shimoda, among others. Order from Small Press Distribution here.

Half of What They Carried Flew Away

Andrea Rexilius

Poetry. Half of What They Carried Flew Away is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, somewhere between concept and place, sometime between primordial and the everyday. Or it is scripture, yet to be consecrated, telling of a group always at the margins, peripheral, transitory, and engaged in a migration one might sense abstractly – “a material that reorders the shape of a room” – but…

New Organism

Andrea Rexilius

I am a girl, and what does it feel like to be a girl. It feels like a hand over your mouth. A hand over your mouth and on your thighs. Some say it is the sound of a rabbit before it is caught. It is the sound of the sky before it comes crashing down.Order from Small Press Distribution here.

Benediction

Alice Notley

the benediction of the poison. it seals you from making the mistake, as I said in the very beginning– ‘im poison youre poison robert johnson is poison’– of living in the collective imagination both venal and decent, horrible. the poison is benedictive, and I am. I bless but only if you want that anyone can bless anyone I bless anyone. Order from Small Press Distribution here.

Iowa

Travis Nichols

In Iowa, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they house: “The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats.” With youthful perplexity and zeal, a humorous and caustic violence of reflection drives this meditative, unclassifiable book. The scary truth is that the foreignness of private teenage cant was always asking the right questions. Now, we just have to listen: “Is this the…

Texture Notes

Sawako Nakayasu

Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu’s…

The Feel Trio

Fred Moten

Gold Medal Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry. Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. The Feel Trio is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that The Feel Trio are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that’s the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of The Feel Trio, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, The Feel Trio tries to put some things together. Alabama runs through those things like nobody’s business. I kept…

The Service Porch

Fred Moten

The third and final volume of Fred Moten's poetic trilogy (including The Feel Trio and The Little Edges), The Service Porch is expansive meditation on black life, love, violence, and the adventure of making art. Moten returns here to reinvent some of his earliest poetic visions and strikes up a conversation with many of the most brilliant African American visual artists through a series of epistolary and ekphrastic poems. By turns mournful, tender, ferocious, and heart-breakingly honest, The Service Porch is an open letter, a play list, and a hive of prayer and joy. Order from Small Press Distribution here.

all that beauty

Fred Moten

A new book of poetry by Fred Moten called all that beauty was released on October 15, 2019. An SPD Best-Seller for 13 months running--including 3 months at the #1 spot--All That Beauty was named a top Poetry Book of the Year by the New York Times in 2019.

This Isa Nice Neighborhood

Farid Matuk

Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? This Isa Nice Neighborhood, Farid Matuk’s first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined. This Isa Nice Neighborhood has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the…

Debt

Mark Levine

The 25th-Anniversary Edition of Debt, the National Poetry Series Winner and debut poetry collection by Mark Levine. With a new introduction by Srikanth Reddy. "The velocity of these poems will induce motion sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine’s aerial acrobatics always return us, largely intact, to common ground. It might even be sacred ground. For all its existentialist pratfalls and murderous chicanery, Debt is a profoundly elegiac work, from its dedicatory epitaph to the final poem’s darkling closure. Our heaviest debt, the most timeless poems remind us, is to the historical dead." -- Srikanth Reddy, from…

More Radiant Signal

Juliana Leslie

Clark Coolidge, in reference to his own poems, writes, “We are accustomed to regard words in only one way—as vehicle. My experiments invite you to regard words as an object—or more exactly, as an organism, with patterns of existing that are specific to itself, inexplicable and marvelous.” More Radiant Signal, by Juliana Leslie, is a book of poems with patterns of existing, both inexplicable and marvelous. Like Coolidge, Leslie regards words as an object, as an organism, as structural units apart from their typical semantics. And in this way, Leslie builds, poem by poem, an alternative poetic literacy—idiosyncratic and highly…

Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Jessica Laser

Jessica Laser's debut full-length collection of poetry. Published on March 15, 2019. There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly broken down in tears of joy in front of the state council, trying to read aloud a commendatory letter from the sovereign that began, “Sergei Kuzmich! From all sides rumors reach me...” Those not involved in falling in love at the party laugh, appearing involved in this…

Grace Period

Aaron Kunin

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, "Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace." Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period : Notebooks, 1998–2007 would like to be something more interesting. Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and…

Ode: Salute to The New York School

Peter Gizzi

Poetry. An abecedarian cento of New York School poems, this piece was first delivered in March 1996 at The Popular Culture Association Conference. As Gizzi notes: "Ode: Salute to The New York School is a cento, a late Roman verse form made up of lines from other sources. First, I put together a chronological bibliography of over 100 books published by New York poets from 1950 to 1970. Many of these books are deeply out of print so I had to do some real digging. Then I extracted lines from each book to compose the cento. Happily, Clark Coolidge supplied…

Like a Thin Hustle

Janelle Effiwatt

Can It!

Edmund Berrigan

A memoir and other texts. March 2013. Order from Small Press Distribution here.