Poetry for the Neon Apocalypse


Book Description

This full length collection from Boston poet Jake Tringali is a mysterious reflection on the life process. Written with an intellectual punk rock attitude, we are led through scientific concepts, dives and hangouts, lustful abandon, and openness to new experiences. Many of these poems are published in independent journals.




Vanishing Acts


Book Description

In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress. A linked sequence of poems forms the book’s backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return—or hoped for return—of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world’s last catfish sleeps “in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam.” The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent. The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.




The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void


Book Description

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower's many dream guises-its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author's own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang's poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.




Super/heroes


Book Description

This collection explores contemporary superhero narratives, including comic books and films, in a wider mythic context. Since the 1930s superheroes have come to dominate a variety of media formats. Why are audiences so fascinated with heroes, and what makes the idea of heroes so necessary in society?




The Apocalyptic Mannequin


Book Description

Doomsday is here and the earth is suffering with each breath she takes. Whether it’s from the nuclear meltdown, the wrath of the Four Horsemen, a war with technology, or a consequence of our relationship with the planet, humanity is left buried and hiding, our bones exposed, our hearts beating somewhere in our freshly slit throats. This is a collection that strips away civilization and throws readers into the lives of its survivors. The poems inside are undelivered letters, tear-soaked whispers, and unanswered prayers. They are every worry you’ve had when your electricity went out, and every pit that grew in your stomach watching the news at night. They are tragedy and trauma, but they are also grief and fear, fear of who—or what—lives inside us once everything is taken away. These pages hold the teeth of monsters against the faded photographs of family and friends, and here, Wytovich is both plague doctor and midwife, both judge and jury, forever searching through severed limbs and exposed wires as she straddles the line evaluating what’s moral versus what’s necessary to survive. What’s clear though, is that the world is burning and we don’t remember who we are. So tell me: who will you become when it’s over? "Reading this collection is like dancing through Doomsday, intoxicated by the destructive, decadent truth of desire in our very mortality." --Saba Syed Razvi, author of Heliophobia and In the Crocodile Gardens "Vivid, each word a weight on your tongue, these poems taste of metal and ash with a hint of spice, smoke. She reminds us the lucky ones die first, and those who remain must face the horrors of a world painted in blisters and fear." --Todd Keisling, author of Ugly Little Things and Devil's Creek "Set in a post-apocalyptic world that at times seems all too near, Wytovich's poems conjure up frighteningly beautiful and uncomfortably prescient imagery." --Claire C. Holland, author of I Am Not Your Final Girl "A surreal journey through an apocalyptic wasteland, a world that is terrifyingly reminiscent of our own even as the blare of evacuation alarms drowns out the sizzle of acid rain, smiling mannequins bear witness to a hundred thousand deaths, and "the forest floor grows femurs in the light of a skeletal moon."--Christa Carmen, author of Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked "Like a doomsday clock fast-forwarding to its final self-destruction, Wytovich's poetry will give you whiplash as you flip through page after page. The writing here is ugly yet beautiful. It reads like a disease greedily eating up vital organs. The apocalypse has arrived and it couldn't be more intoxicating!" --Max Booth III, author of Carnivorous Lunar Activities




Snapshots of the Apocalypse


Book Description

In these dark, witty short stories, Katy Wimhurst creates off-kilter worlds which illuminate our own. Here, knitting might cancel Armageddon. A winged being yearns to be an archaeologist. Readers are sucked into a post-apocalyptic London where the different rains are named after former politicians. An enchanted garden grows in a rented flat. Magical realism meets dystopia, with a refreshing twist. Advance Praise: 'An iridescent, compelling collection. Darkly magical in all the right ways.' - Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch and Speak Gigantular 'Tales of the unexpected... a refreshing and humorous collection illuminating the author's vast imagination and gift for merging people, place and politics in well crafted stories. Wimhurst's cultural allusions and social commentary might make you laugh or glance sideways, but there are always sparks of human hope amongst the dystopian debris. One ticket here please, open return.' - Emma Kittle-Pey, author of Gold Adornments and Fat Maggie. 'These are fresh and exciting pieces, and I loved the sense of these unsettling off-kilter worlds, reminiscent of M John Harrison's You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press). I think readers will enjoy the author's skilful balance of wit and playfulness with dark and frightening things; magical realism with a melancholy and often chilling twist.' - Anna Vaught, author of Saving Lucia and Famished. 'Katy Wimhurst finds hope in dystopias; colour in the bleakest of worlds. Her art is in combining charming whimsy with weighty social issues and, in the balance, delighting and surprising her reader. Her rich imagination and fresh, clean writing is, at all times, a pleasure.' - Petra McQueen, founder of The Writers' Company 'Katy Wimhurst's stories are enchanting. They appear beguilingly simple yet contain layers of meaning and mystery. Although often comical, each story has a hidden steel core - an environmental message that we need to cherish our planet and be compassionate to one another. She specialises in dystopias - in societies overwhelmed by the threats we fear - but even here the endings sound a positive note. We remain enchanted.' - Dorothy Schwarz, author of Behind a Glass Wall and Simple Stories about Women. Extract: Ticket to Nowhere "Destination?" asked the woman in the railway ticket office. She had pink blotchy skin and dark bags under her eyes. "Nowhere," I said. "Single or return?" "Can I get an open return for the next train?" "Not during peak hours." I sighed. "Okay, single then." I had no idea how long I would be in Nowhere, but had taken a few days off work, anyway. "That'll be £35." "For a one-way ticket to Nowhere? That's a complete rip-off!" "Take it or leave it," the woman said flatly. "Nowhere's the cheapest destination on offer. I can do Elsewhere for £44 or Somewhere for £52. We have a special offer to Everywhere for £99, which includes free vouchers for a Nirvana milk-shake and Armageddon hamburger." "I need a ticket to Nowhere." I opened my purse and handed over the money. "When does the next train leave?" "In five minutes from platform three." I took the ticket, picked up my suitcase, and followed the signs to platform three. Pacing resolutely, I was conscious of the click-click of my high heeled boots on the floor. It was dark outside apart from the dim lamps that lit the platform at intervals. A lonely half-moon was hovering high above, and I turned up the collar of my woollen overcoat.




Chouteau's Chalk


Book Description

In Chouteau’s Chalk, Rosa Lane’s poems take a deep dive into the emotional and the erotic. Gender bent, her poems reside amid a tomboy’s emerging sexual identity within a world confined by heterosexual construction and its persistent mores. Her collection piques a countermythos that unfolds within a small fishing village opening a forbidden and hidden world with sensorial intensity and lyrical momentum. An epigraph from Audre Lorde’s notable work The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power hovers over every poem from birth through marriage, traversing calamities and holograms of desire, giving the “I” permission to assume full agency with power and dignity in a manner that is as acute as revelatory.




Wilder


Book Description

A prize-winning debut poetry collection touching on themes of nature, loss, and history. In Wilder—selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm. Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos—and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan’s hopeful words are fissured by erasure—yawns wide. Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. “Some of us didn’t have lungs left,” writes Wahmanholm. “So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky—when we were told to pay attention to our breath—we had to improvise.” The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is “black at noon, black in the afternoon.” Praise for Wilder “Full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain.” —Rick Barot “A lyric and formally daring collection.” —Poets & Writers “Wahmanholm moves lyrically through an apocalyptic disaster in her stunning and disquieting debut. . . . Wahmanholm’s poems are studies in devastation and stark representations of the accompanying shock.” —Publishers Weekly “Wahmanholm’s careful curation of words and sounds cradle the reader. . . . The poems in Wilder are powerful and compelling, interested not only in confronting the rifts in our history and landscape, but connecting us to each other.” —Arkansas International




Beat Culture


Book Description

The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity. Beat Culture captures in a single volume six decades of cultural and countercultural expression in the arts and society. It goes beyond other works, which are often limited to Beat writers like William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Michael McClure, to cover a wide range of musicians, painters, dramatists, filmmakers, and dancers who found expression in the Bohemian movement known as the Beat Generation. Top scholars from the United States, England, Holland, Italy, and China analyze a vast array of topics including sexism, misogny, alcoholism, and drug abuse within Beat circles; the arrest of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges; Beat dress and speech; and the Beat "pad." Through more than 250 entries, which travel from New York to New Orleans, from San Francisco to Mexico City, students, scholars, and those interested in popular culture will taste the era's rampant freedom and experimentation, explore the impact of jazz on Beat writings, and discover how Beat behavior signaled events such as the sexual revolution, the peace movement, and environmental awareness.




Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit


Book Description

Finalist, League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Oneiric, fabulist, hilarious, surreal. No single term seems to sufficiently contain Mikko Harvey’s delightful, cheeky, absurdist, inimitable debut collection. A bomb and a raindrop make small talk as they fall through the air; a trip to the phlebotomist evolves into a nightmarish party; a boy finds himself turning into a piano key. Reading Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is like spending the day at the strangest amusement park you've ever seen. At first the rides appear familiar, then you realize they possess the power to not merely thrill and terrify, but also to destabilize your very notion of “amusement.” These poems veer sharply away from what’s normally expected from poetry, landing readers instead in that awkward, lonely, interior space where we may be most ourselves. Along with beauty and humour, there is menace here, the threat of disfigurement and death around every turn. But somehow, Harvey manages to make that menace, too, a place of wonder.