I Am Finished With History
“The hallowed argument goes: The artist has vanished but the art lives. Franklin adds: Art lives and so does the materials that made the art. They mark us as much as we’ve manipulated them.” -Esther Lin
Author: Nanya Jhingran
So You Are Here, and There Still
“Throughout Metzger’s poems, we experience an artist patching together experiences– present and past–, sometimes creating tectonic friction between them, in order to dwell on the meaning of life.” -David Roderick
An Empire Elsewhere
Ceballos captures the violent reality oppressed and exploited people face due to U.S. involvement in their home country’s economy and politics that force them to eventually leave. Through elegies, we’re made aware of the horrors they face after fleeing to the U.S.
Each Time You Enter You’ll Carry a Mouthful of Names
“Whereas Bilotserkivets speaks of the immediacy of survival,–what do I and You have to do in order to get beyond this current or recently passed stage of destruction and horror–Shuvalova picks up with the implicit question of how are you acting to remember that this is not something that just passes for everybody, that in order to read about these horrors they must be experienced by real, living countries.” -Cody Stetzel
I Had to Clear my Throat
“Speaking these poems out loud, you will hear the sounds that Simmonds was able to put on the page, the way songs move with their own time, and how they push our bodies to inhabit that time.” — Mark Spero
One-Legged Bird
“The loneliness that drenches Burying the Mountain derives from rejection and alienation, but also from portent.” —Angelo Mao
The Plain Became My Hunger’s Home
“The body and the land mirror each other in their growth and development, in their ability to be beautifully reset and be born from last year’s ‘undue shrubbery.'” – Cass Garison
A Myth Against Empire
“H of H Playbook is a submission to our collective conscience, a treatise against empire, and a reminder that there is no myth nor story that can replace actual, material human experience.” – Dujie Tahat
Where the Sunflowers Have Pointed
“Each of these books carries with it this breath of endurance — that life is spectacularly painful, and each day our choices work toward some method of minimizing this pain.” – Cody Stetzel
Embodied Placements
“Sharif excavates orientations of space and time, revealing a tense lucidity.”