{"title":"A few of our favorite reads in 2023","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"09-29-2020-the-essential-ruth-stone","title":"Stone, Ruth: The Essential Ruth Stone","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdited by Bianca Stone (Copper Canyon Press, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 29, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Expertly and sensitively selected by her granddaughter Bianca,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Essential Ruth Stone\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ebears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America's most influential and pioneering poets. Distilling twelve books into a single volume―from the wild formalism of her early work to the science-filled cosmic intellect of her final collection―\u003cem\u003eThe Essential Ruth Stone\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eshows a visionary poet with a physical grasp on language. Dazzling, humorous and grief-stricken poems explore the continuity of loss and love, in the spectral appearances of the dead husband, to portraits of an American childhood, life during wartime, and complex metaphysical inquiries into consciousness itself. Ruth Stone's feminism, mysticism and overall fierceness shine through her wit and passion. Moving gracefully between the loneliness of grief and loss to the fullness of life and love, Stone approaches all her subjects with a profound humanity, an understanding born from her own lived experiences.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31629619626007,"sku":"9781556596087","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ruth_f27b832e-a9b2-44e3-90ed-8b2b9f566907.gif?v=1593643904"},{"product_id":"01-26-2021-the-sunflower-cast-a-spell-to-save-us-from-the-void-by-jackie-wang","title":"Wang, Jackie: The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eNightboat Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 2, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems in \u003ci\u003eThe Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void\u003c\/i\u003e read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDetailElements\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31638199730199,"sku":"9781643620367","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/wang.gif?v=1594074580"},{"product_id":"09-21-2021-migrations-poem-1976-2020-by-gloria-gervitz","title":"Gervitz, Gloria: Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020","description":"\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Mark Schafer (New York Review Books, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 2, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: An epic, single-poem tribute to the spirit of women, this is the first complete and final translation of the great Mexican poet's magnum opus. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eForty-three years in the making, \u003ci\u003eMigrations\u003c\/i\u003e is considered by critics to be a masterpiece of modern Mexican literature. Gervitz's book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman's reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power. Gervitz's work has been compared to the works of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and Guillén. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator Forrest Gander has called \u003ci\u003eMigrations\u003c\/i\u003e \"one of the great poems of the 21st century.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMark Schafer's pioneering translation of Gervitz's lifework is a poetic feat in its own right.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39277236158487,"sku":"9781681375700","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/gg_7d94b60c-a0f3-4705-ab98-63bbb3ed95d6.gif?v=1616869303"},{"product_id":"10-01-2021-pink-waves-by-sawako-nakayasu","title":"Nakayasu, Sawako: Pink Waves","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOmnidawn, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: January 20th, 2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Publisher Marketing: \u003c\/span\u003eA poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003eWritten in loose sonata form,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ewas completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eWaveform\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eby Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlack Dada Reader\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eby Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman's\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eKetjak\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eholds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"Nakayasu's \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is an experience of questions becoming artifacts. The speaker asks: 'how will i locate expansiveness in touch'? By 'dreamlight', a reader is trained, by this speaker, in a process of listening that's both a 'pledge of silence' and the recognition that 'we come to a limit and stop where it fits.' Is this 'genre trouble'? Nakayasu has written a book a writer could read, orienting to the desk, to the 'passing moment, ' in turn. This is grounding. This is beautiful.\"--Bhanu Kapil, author of \u003cem\u003eHow to Wash a Heart\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e deepens my immense admiration for Nakayasu's poems and translations. Expansive, working across genres, she always pushes her writing into new places. In \u003cem\u003ePink Waves\u003c\/em\u003e, she has found another way to rigorously clear a space for herself or, perhaps more accurately, her many selves, attaining a fresh perspective. Registering the world crashing into her life, we hear and learn the different languages that flow around her, as well as encounter references to--and echoes of--Adam Pendelton's collage text \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlack Dada\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, Valerie Solanas's radical feminist \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eSCUM Manifesto\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, Sol LeWitt's 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, ' and Ron Silliman's groundbreaking \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eKetjak\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e. She uses collage to give a resilient, changing shape to our relentless influx of chaos, and the resulting feelings of anxiety, passion, anger, and love stirred up in us. Turning detritus into sensuous music, Nakayasu's greatness arises from [undertaking] 'Experiments in Joy, ' à la Gabrielle Civil, to find a way to live in the here and now.\"--John Yau, author of \u003cem\u003eGenghis Chan on Drums\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39300689330199,"sku":"9781632430984","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_5e093f58-e66f-4083-9adc-0104625a9872.gif?v=1664657092"},{"product_id":"09-28-2021-the-danish-notebook-by-michael-palmer","title":"Palmer, Michael: The Danish Notebook","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNightboat Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eJanuary 10th, 2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: A reissue of Michael Palemer's poetry notebook first published in 1999 and now considered a classic of the genre of poet's prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eThe Danish Notebook\u003c\/em\u003e Michael Palmer sets out to discover which images and designs will appear when his reflections (on poetry, collaboration, work, travel) and memories (of chance meetings, conversations among friends, books read and movies seen) are set down on paper. The result is part memoir, part correspondence, travel diary, and poetic essay. Moving from the streets of Paris and San Francisco to the top of a Hawaiian volcano, it reveals a rare, personal look at one of the most original and influential poets of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39308690653207,"sku":"9781643621234","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/mpalmer.jpg?v=1621013666"},{"product_id":"05-09-2022-you-can-be-the-last-leaf-selected-poems-by-maya-abu-al-hayyat","title":"Abu Al-Hayyat, Maya: You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: May 10, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArt. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected \/ by the gate, \/ blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli colonial rule.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now \/ as you coerce your kids to sleep \/ in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans \/ to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war \/ that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39400763097111,"sku":"9781571315403","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_46.gif?v=1633731270"},{"product_id":"04-12-2022-things-you-may-find-hidden-in-my-ear-poems-from-gaza-by-mosab-abu-toha","title":"Abu Toha, Mosab: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCity Lights, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: April 26, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular, his visions of life, continuity, time, possibility, and beauty. His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.\"—Naomi Shihab Nye\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Mosab Abu Toha's elegant and unforgettable poetry calls me to celebrate the struggle to survive. Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Milosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.\"—Mary Karr\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39425497301015,"sku":"9780872868601","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9780872868601_68ef5.jpg?v=1634948803"},{"product_id":"09-06-2022-in-a-few-minutes-before-later-by-brenda-hillman","title":"Hillman, Brenda: In a Few Minutes Before Later (HC)","description":"\u003cp\u003eWesleyan University Press, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 4, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: [Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful. --Harvard Review\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAn iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003ci data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eDuring an enchantment in the life\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eDo you love a living person\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eabsolutely? Tell them now.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn a half-unwieldy life you made, under\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ethe hyaline sky, while the dead\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003edrank from zigzag pools nearby,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eif they saved you in your wild incapacities,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ein timing of the world's harm\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ein a little pettiness in your own heart while others took\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eyour madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ewhen others said you should feel grateful\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eto be minimally adequate for the world's\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003etriple exposure or some tired committee...\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe ones who love us, how do they\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ebreak through our defenses?\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWe're tired today. Come back later.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTheir baffled voices melting our wax walls\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ewith a candle, the ones who understand\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ewhat being is--the glowing, the broken,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ethe wheels, the brave ones--\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ethey have their courage,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eyou have yours;\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ewhen you meet the one you love,\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eit is so rare. When you meet\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ethe one who loves you, it is extremely rare.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39893363097623,"sku":"9780819500151","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_28_5b17882e-d5d3-46f6-ae73-2cabf0aa5420.gif?v=1645666086"},{"product_id":"09-13-2022-please-make-me-pretty-i-dont-want-to-die-poems-by-tawanda-mulalu","title":"Mulalu, Tawanda: Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePrinceton University Press, paperback\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: September 13, 2022\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003ci\u003e Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eexplores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem \"prayers\" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring--one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: \"The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn \/ distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window \/ a synecdoche of country.\"\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40182003695639,"sku":"9780691239033","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_86_7839762c-7698-47a5-885e-bd33fcdcbf5a.gif?v=1656543018"},{"product_id":"7-12-2022-bimboland-by-erin-taylor","title":"Taylor, Erin: Bimboland","description":"\u003cp\u003eArchway Editions, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: December 6, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: An astonishing debut poetry collection wrestling with desire, vulnerability, sex work and money from writer and poet Erin Taylor. Erin Taylor's\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eBimboland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis an astute and confident debut, balancing, in their blistering and tender style, their life as a sex worker and socialist politics. The poems are full of desire and vulnerability, insight and calls to action, both personal and societal. You can get lost in the insatiable pace of their words and the way in which you feel, as they feel, \"powerful yet somehow \/ nothing.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40193868431383,"sku":"9781576879917","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_89_a414d892-72f8-44ea-abca-64f2be3d2ce5.gif?v=1657146979"},{"product_id":"browning-sommer-good-actors","title":"Browning, Sommer: Good Actors","description":"\u003cp\u003eBirds, LLC; paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: July 5, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublisher Marketing: At birth we are given a role--it is our name. GOOD ACTORS is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend. Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, GOOD ACTORS is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40206023196695,"sku":"9781734632101","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_94.gif?v=1657837478"},{"product_id":"08-23-22-el-ghadbanah-banah-la-syrena-visions-of-a-syrian-mermaid-from-space","title":"El Ghadbanah, Banah: La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space","description":"\u003cp\u003eDzanc Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: August 23, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003ci\u003eLA SYRENA. For me home is in the water. When I go to the sea I want to swim forever and never look back. But I know I would die and the earth needs me on shore. My home is Syria and Syria for me is like the sea. I want nothing more than to jump in and swim around forever. In Syria I am declared wanted, like so many of us displaced lunar divas. The longing I feel is the deepest kind. It could crack the whole earth open. I am a Lumerian from Ancient Sumeria, a southern space creature in a northern world, LA SYRNENA, zhe is my destiny.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this collection, each poem flows like water on the page. The author weaves in stories, mantras, revolutionary messages, the movement of arabic letters, the memory of Sumerian cuneiform. This book is a hybrid creature between poem-story-form that crosses genres like it crosses dimensions. In this work, you are the mermaid. You are the forever migrant, a traveler between the oceanic and the extraterrestrial, across continents and planets. You are a time traveler, and you speak many languages. You are LA SYRENA, conjuring your own space to feel free.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWinner of the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40222517952535,"sku":"9781950539444","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail-2022-07-27T132505.903.gif?v=1658953811"},{"product_id":"01-24-2023-bates-gabrielle-judas-goat","title":"Bates, Gabrielle: Judas Goat","description":"\u003cp\u003eTin House Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: January 24, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFinalist for the Washington State Book Award!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: times new roman, serif;\" face=\"times new roman, serif\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003eGabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003eJudas Goat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003e plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of thirty-nine poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcize childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.\u003c\/span\u003e \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: times new roman, serif;\" face=\"times new roman, serif\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"im\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003eIn confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003eJudas Goat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003e holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;\" dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGabrielle Bates\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e is a writer, visual artist, and co-host of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Poet Salon\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e podcast. Her poetry has appeared in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePoetry\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e Magazine, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAmerican Poetry Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e, and other publications. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Gabrielle lives in Seattle, Washington. \u003cem\u003eJudas Goat\u003c\/em\u003e, her debut collection, was named an NPR best book of 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42622452334615,"sku":"9781953534644","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/JudasGoat_FinalCover_1.jpg?v=1660609913"},{"product_id":"09-13-22-abrao-gabi-notes-on-shapeshifting","title":"Abrão, Gabi: Notes on Shapeshifting","description":"\u003cp\u003eNot a Cult, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 13, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Abrāo's work has been described by \u003ci\u003eThe Outline\u003c\/i\u003e as \"an existential funhouse of familiar thoughts\" that \"publicly grapples with pillars of its own existence within the influencer economy.\" Alongside \u003ci\u003eThe Outline\u003c\/i\u003e, her work has been featured in publications such as \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDazed\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Harvard Crimson\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Face\u003c\/i\u003e, among others. In response to Abrāo's work, \u003ci\u003eDazed Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e wrote, \"Gabi debunks the myth that wellness is the preserve of the privileged, and in doing so hands it back to the masses,\" and \u003ci\u003eNotes on Shapeshifting\u003c\/i\u003e is a reminder that we are agents of the change that we seek.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGabi Abrāo's \u003ci\u003eNotes on Shapeshifting\u003c\/i\u003e is an ode to existing in physical form, fully aware of the changing energy that flows through every aspect of it. As Abrāo writes, \"tapping into the ether body to take a break from the demands of the earth body, \/ making peace with ephemerality, \/ lightness, \/ shapeshifting\". Throughout this collection, you are invited to travel through various states; pure infatuation to heartbreak, confidence to defeat, from a skepticism for living to a full-on trust in it. And Notes on Shapeshifting yearns to soothe and arouse along the way.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40276295024663,"sku":"9781945649820","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_c98e2271-dc0b-4fbe-add2-fad9697cc70f.gif?v=1661922663"},{"product_id":"09-20-22-ringleb-jayme-so-tall-it-ends-in-heaven","title":"Ringleb, Jayme: So Tall It Ends in Heaven","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTin House Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: September 20th, 2022\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: With lush and deeply intimate language, Jayme Ringleb's debut collection \u003cem\u003eSo Tall It Ends in Heaven\u003c\/em\u003e explores sexuality, estrangement, and the distances we travel for love.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFollowing the end of a marriage, \u003cem\u003eSo Tall It Ends in Heaven\u003c\/em\u003e's queer southern speaker tries to restore a relationship with his father. His father lives across an ocean, but more keeps them apart than just that: the father rejected his son long ago after learning that his son is gay. The poems search for answers across the United States and Europe, in and out of historical imagination, as the speaker struggles to separate his understanding of devotion and belonging from the constant losses in his life. Drawing from--and subverting--the formal traditions of love poems, parables, and elegies, the collection claims a vital space for one's own solace. \"Nobody will love you \/ like this poem does,\" the speaker says; \"Tell this poem \/ what you want. \/\/ Anything.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn turns that are ruminative, funny, and tender, Jayme Ringleb's debut collection questions what and whom one lets go of by coming out--can love, in all its complexities, ever be uncoupled from grief?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40282719289367,"sku":"9781953534408","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_1bb5a330-2846-480c-acc8-8bd479d69803.gif?v=1662241512"},{"product_id":"11-01-22-mayer-bernadette-milkweed-smithereens","title":"Mayer, Bernadette: Milkweed Smithereens","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew Directions, paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 1st, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cem\u003eMilkweed Smithereens\u003c\/em\u003e gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her \u003cem\u003eCovid Diary\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSecond World of Nature\u003c\/em\u003e to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her \"The Lobelias of Fear\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e...but how will we, still alive, socialize\u003cbr\u003e in the winter? wrapped in bear skins\u003cbr\u003e we'll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating\u003cbr\u003e the lobelias of fear left over from desperation, \u003cbr\u003e last summer's woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of black\u003cbr\u003e cherries eaten in a hurry\u003cbr\u003e while the yard grows in the moonlight\u003cbr\u003e shrinking like a salary ...\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40308088995863,"sku":"9780811229227","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_58dd75f2-6ac8-4c23-997e-256cf8916fdc.gif?v=1663198405"},{"product_id":"stephane-bouquet-common-lif","title":"Bouquet, Stéphane: Common Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eNightboat Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 7th, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play--all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world. In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40321966145559,"sku":"9781643621531","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_db8610c6-f82e-4025-aa37-ca25b932986c.jpg?v=1664007333"},{"product_id":"taylor-courtney-faye-concentrate","title":"Taylor, Courtney Faye: Concentrate","description":"\u003cp\u003eGraywolf Press, paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 1, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWinner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins--a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins's murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor's poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against--and between--women of color.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eConcentrate\u003c\/i\u003e displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood's relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor's inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. \"Concentrate,\" she writes. \"We have decisions to make. 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Chaos, Crossing-her first book in English, translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid-is also about finding calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40447864176663,"sku":"9781954218079","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781954218079.jpg?v=1670446044"},{"product_id":"04-04-2023-baker-quenton-ballast","title":"Baker, Quenton: Ballast (PB)","description":"\u003cp\u003eHaymarket Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication date: April 4, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig \u003ci\u003eCreole\u003c\/i\u003e as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIn 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the ship \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003eCreole\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e. 135 people escaped chattel slavery that day. The event was recounted in US Senate documents, including letters exchanged between US and British consulates in The Bahamas and depositions from the white crew on the ship. There is no known record or testimony from the 135 people who escaped. Their story has been lost to time and indifference. Quenton Baker’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003eballast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is an attempt at incomplete redress.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith imagination, deep empathy, and skilled and compelling lyricism, Baker took a black marker to those Senate documents and culled a poetic recount of the \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003eCreole\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e revolt. Layers of ink connect readers to Baker’s poetic process: (re)phrasing the narrative of the state through a dexterous process of hands-on redactions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eballast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a relentless, wrenching, and gorgeously written book, a defiant reclamation of one of the most important but overlooked events in US history, and an essential contribution to contemporary poetry.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40455726432279,"sku":"9781642599022","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781642599022-f_medium-32408bdbdc507410d196a05c5328d357.jpg?v=1670990941"},{"product_id":"may-james-davis-unusually","title":"May, James Davis: Unusually Grand Ideas","description":"\u003cp\u003eLouisiana State University Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 22, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Titled after one of the side effects of antidepressants, Unusually Grand Ideas is a poignant account of clinical depression and the complications it introduces to marriage and fatherhood. James Davis May's poems describe mental illness with nuance, giving a full account of the darkness but also the flashes of hope, love, and even humor that lead toward healing. In pieces ranging from spare lyrical depictions of pain to discursive meditations that argue for hope, May searches for meaning by asking the difficult but important questions that both trouble and sustain us.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40459346870295,"sku":"9780807176597","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_25658154-cbc8-4cf5-86ae-e84dfb68e342.gif?v=1671321974"},{"product_id":"sharpe-christina-ordinary-n","title":"Sharpe, Christina: Ordinary Notes (HB)","description":"\u003cp\u003eFarrar, Straus \u0026amp; Giroux, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 25, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The critically acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eIn the Wake\u003c\/i\u003e, \"Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility\" (Saidiya Hartman).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA singular achievement, \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Notes\u003c\/i\u003e explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past--public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal--with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature--always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the heart of \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Notes\u003c\/i\u003e is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. \"I learned to see in my mother's house,\" writes Sharpe. \"I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.\" Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of \"beauty as a method,\" collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a \"Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,\" and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e4-color art throughout\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40478674059287,"sku":"9780374604486","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/31BNwkFePIL._AC_SY1000.jpg?v=1673736906"},{"product_id":"lapointe-sasha-taqwsəblu-rose-quart","title":"LaPointe, Sasha Taqwsəblu: Rose Quartz","description":"\u003cp\u003eMilkweed Editions, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: January 1, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing--and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual. \"Draw me encircled \/\/ in something \/\/ other than gasoline.\" The poems of Rose Quartz hum with the naked energy of one who has found her way home after a journey rife with difficulty and who has the scars to show for it. In them, Sasha taqwsəblu LaPointe moves from intimate scenes of peril--a car accident, an unwelcome advance at a party, a miscarriage--to the salvific, exhilarating punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and the centering shores of her Coast Salish ancestors. Along the way, she peers into the darker corners of her own search for belonging, and finds there glittering stones dense with meaning and the power to move forward. As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above--rose--vie for the speaker's embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power. Like the stones and cards laid on an altar, Rose Quartz offers a reading at the intersection of identity and myth, trauma and truth, telling the story of past, present, and future.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40478674518039,"sku":"9781571315434","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/51iW5Spy5uL._AC_SY780.jpg?v=1673736933"},{"product_id":"tbd-t-b-d-multiverse","title":"Ellis, Jjjjjerome: Aster of Ceremonies","description":"\u003cp\u003eMilkweed Editions, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 24, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse--a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent--JJJJJerome Ellis's \u003ci\u003eAster of Ceremonies\u003c\/i\u003e beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, \u003ci\u003eThe Clearing\u003c\/i\u003e, a \"lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech\" (Claudia Rankine). \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAster of Ceremonies\u003c\/i\u003e asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before--and the stutters that leaven those voices--carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, \"Bring me the stolen will \/ Bring me the stolen well,\" his voice is a conduit, his \"me\" is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestors--Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others--and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy weaving a chorus of voices past and present, Ellis counters the attack of \"all masters of all vessels\" and replaces it with a family of flowers. He models how--as with his brilliant transduction of escaped slave advertisements--we might proclaim lost ownership over literature and history. \"Bring me to the well,\" he chants, implores, channels. \"Bring me to me.\" In this bringing, in this singing, he proclaims our collective belonging to shared worlds where we can gather and heal.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40478674681879,"sku":"9781639550128","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/AsterOfCeremonies_300dpi_RGB.jpg?v=1673736940"},{"product_id":"07-01-2023-tuffaha-lena-khalaf-kaan-and-her-sisters","title":"[B4G] Tuffaha, Lena Khalaf: Kaan and Her Sisters","description":"\u003cp\u003eTrio House Press\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: July 1, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLena Khalaf Tuffaha's \u003cem\u003eKaan and Her Sisters\u003c\/em\u003e illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration. Tuffaha writes in the liminal space between languages, personifying Arabic verbs who guide the reader through a \"history hurtling into the future.\" \u003cem\u003eKaan and Her Sisters \u003c\/em\u003ecenters character of the Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, whose progressive displacements from Palestine and across Arab cities unfold in epistles, refashioned songs, and glimpses into the interiors of her lost home. In these disclosures, a study of time and a record of resistance to erasure emerges, and at its heart, the women who keep intergenerational memory. \"Our mothers miraculous, persevering.\/No maps are new to the ancestors.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42314894016535,"sku":"9781949487145","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/Tuffahafrontcover.jpg?v=1675283961"},{"product_id":"lynch-erin-marie-removal-acpb","title":"Lynch, Erin Marie: Removal Acts","description":"\u003cp\u003eGraywolf Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 3, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment. Removal Acts takes its speaker's fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of \"removal\" in its many forms—as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit—Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40635198406679,"sku":"9781644452530","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781644452530.jpg?v=1675556324"},{"product_id":"delgado-nicole-cecilia-adjacent-ipb","title":"Delgado, Nicole Cecilia: Adjacent Islands","description":"\u003cp\u003eUgly Duckling Presse, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: December 1, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book art is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked in its pages and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNicole Cecilia Delgado’s book art is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked in its pages and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. ADJACENT ISLANDS\/\u003ci\u003eislas adyacentes\u003c\/i\u003e is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” \u003ci\u003eadjacent aslands\u003c\/i\u003e \/ \u003ci\u003eislas adjacentes\u003c\/i\u003e seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Halfway between a life diary and a traveler’s notebook, Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s \u003ci\u003eadjacent aslands\u003c\/i\u003e firmly establishes itself within the tradition of works that cannot be easily categorized. Using travel and exploration as methodology, the poet builds a personal and communal testimony of a territory marked by occupation, usurpation, and abandonment. The book is an intimate map that, like the constellations that decorate the sublime space between the islands, shines and reflects what the author rightly calls the piercing words of our struggle. That ceaseless struggle, which is the struggle against oblivion, resounds with courage and beauty in these poems that emerge pristine from the song of the deep sea, revealing all its secrets. Ecopoetry meets documentary poetry plus fieldwork as meditation as contemplation as activism equals the art book as art object as document as resistance. Hand in hand with a delicate and attentive translation by Urayoán Noel, tenderness, discipline, and survival emerge in these pages as a new holy trinity, ready to unfurl the twisted song of memory. \u003ci\u003eadjacent aslands\u003c\/i\u003e is a graceful, courageous, and necessary reclamation, not only of a territory, but of our own history, of our very origins, those that no colonization will ever be able to take away from us.\" —Carlos Soto Roman\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Nicole Cecilia Delgado's amoná and subtropical dry together weave a poetics of feet on the ground, of territory; they register that experimental time of the camping trip, where we so purposefully surrender ourselves to the sea, the cave, the path, in a type of temporary sensory community that carries all its questions on its back. These \u003ci\u003eadjacent aslands\u003c\/i\u003e open a space for thinking from an embodied practice whose material is time. In this collection, that presumed ‘first man’ could be our traveling companion, a first consciousness understanding itself as part of a cosmic mechanism; today between ceiba tree and anamú herb, tomorrow between asphalt and star. The words that name animals, fruits, coastal life forms, collectives of community struggle and walking bodies — all of them come together rallying in motion, under the sky, unprotected. This is a poetics that is susceptible to microclimates and to the words of the other, anchored in the accumulation of historical accidents, all of it interlocking in that special camping time that fine-tunes the senses. This book is a machine of cosmic times.” —Beatriz Santiago Muñoz\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"In this bilingual edition, Nicole Delgado’s vivid poetry and Urayoán Noel’s deft translations transport us to Mona and Vieques in the Puerto Rican archipelago. Throughout, we witness the poet and her companions camp in these tropical spaces. While they sleep outside, swim naked, pick fruit, and watch the rising sun, they also confront the environmental wounds wrought by colonial militarism. Delgado’s words render their spiritual communion with islands as her community formed new kinships, saw the open sky and its constellations, and listened to the profound songs at the bottom of the sea.\" —Craig Santos Perez\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Nicole's poetry feels like that calm right after lightning strikes. Your body electrifies and the world seems still, quieter. But the natural world is never still, and our bodies are just as animal as the noise in the trees. Desire. We’re not separate. Nicole’s poetry knows this. How can it not? She writes from Puerto Rico, which suffers, acutely, the effects of colonization and the climate crisis. Hers is a poetry written — and lived — amidst Hurricane María, the Wall Street debt crisis, the PROMESA bill, and now a chain of earthquakes [...] along its southern perimeter.” —Katie Marya\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoetry. Art. Latinx Studies. 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Through the untimely death of his father, a handyman and addict, through first loves and lasting loves, Kunz asks what it costs, exactly, to build lives and relationships together. And is it possible to untether this work from the demands of daily survival? With lyrical yet accessible vignettes, expertly weaving melancholia and humor, Kunz brings the reader on a journey across the country, and through American late capitalism, that is both damning and brimming with hope.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40523520704535,"sku":"9780063288591","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_4e779a2e-5bd8-4efd-9295-fc18c9ad05e4.jpg?v=1678316600"},{"product_id":"daniel-mary-alice-mass-for-spb","title":"Daniel, Mary–Alice: Mass for Shut-Ins","description":"\u003cp\u003eYale University Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 21, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Mass for Shut-Ins is a dreamwork distilling the conflicting cultures, languages, and religions that have made Mary-Alice Daniel the writer she is \"Against humans creating hell on earth, Daniel draws on animistic, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from her native Nigeria to unleash potent incantations, rituals and spells, electric as St. Elmo's fire. Buckle up.\"--Rae Armantrout, judge Mary-Alice Daniel is a poet of place. Venturing through landscapes, dreamscapes, and hellscapes, the poems in Mass for Shut-Ins express controlled chaos. They perform cultural excavations and conduct unexpected experiments reflecting idiosyncratic identity. Daniel confronts a tricontinental heritage, engaging the mythos of her nomadic Fulani tribe alongside the Evangelical propaganda and American mass media she was raised on. Charged by a collision of influences, fevered images map an estranged native Nigeria onto an adopted, uneasy America. Animated by African and Western mythic traditions, her poetry conceives an original cosmology. As she investigates her curious placement in many worlds, straying into invisible fields of spiritual warfare, her poems naturally encounter supernatural systems. Wayward spirits haunt an utterly odd universe marked by superstition and the speculative--where it is always nighttime. The poet invites the unreal inside. Her voice is a vortex, a force pulling together something unconventional, otherworldly, intrusively ominous. This collection was selected by award-winning poet Rae Armantrout to become the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40523521064983,"sku":"9780300267990","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_1fd9d3f7-84b9-4c17-a6d0-5d8a29af5c05.jpg?v=1678316618"},{"product_id":"stonecipher-donna-the-ruins-pb","title":"Stonecipher, Donna: The Ruins of Nostalgia","description":"\u003cp\u003eWesleyan University Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 10, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: New work from one of the most compelling and transformative writers of the contemporary prose poem What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic. Some poems take a location, memory, conceit, or object as their theme. Throughout the series, the poems recognize and celebrate the nostalgias they ironize, which are in turn celebrated and then ironized again. Written often in the fictional persona of the first-person plural, The Ruins of Nostalgia explores the rich territory where individual response meets a collective phenomenon.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Ruins of Nostalgia 13\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhere once there had been a low-end stationery store minded by an elderly beauty queen, there was now a store for high-end espresso machines minded by nobody. Where once there had been an illegal beer garden in a weedy lot, there was now a complex of luxury lofts with Parisian-style ivory façades. Where once there had been a bookstore and a bike shop and a bakery, there was now a wax museum for tourists. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been farms there were now subdivisions. Where once there had been subdivisions there were now sub-subdivisions. We lived in a sub-subdivision of a subdivision. We ourselves had become subdivided--where once we had merely been of two minds. * Where once there had been a river there was now a road. A vocal local group had started a movement to break up the road and \"daylight\" the river, which still flowed, in the dark, underneath the road. * Could we daylight the farms, the empty lots, the stationery store, the elderly beauty queen, the city we moved to? Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole? * Could we daylight the ruins of nostalgia?\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40530735628311,"sku":"9780819500847","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/71eXhaDIg-L._SL1500.jpg?v=1777489964"},{"product_id":"oppenheim-meret-the-lovelipb","title":"Oppenheim, Meret: The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Complete Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eWorld Poetry Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 15, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslator: Kathleen Heil\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOppenheim's poetry--49 poems written between 1933 and 1980--moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, \"express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.\" A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that \"the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.\" The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I am in awe of Meret Oppenheim's poems, a seismic force heretofore unknown to me. Her aesthetic compatriots include Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Max Jacob, and Paul Celan--artists of deep symbol, deep void. Kathleen Heil's translations are themselves works of the highest literary refinement and ingenuity. To read Oppenheim's lyric bulletins, conveyed tactfully into English, is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency.\"--Wayne Koestenbaum\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"What an ingenious way of translating this superbly ingenious poet\/artist! Over and over, Kathleen Heil selects a word which many would find out of the way, although I find this a true delight. To me, it feels as deeply surrealist as possible. Two examples may suffice: for the verb 'nimmt, ' she offers us the rare 'thieves' instead of the far more usual 'steals' or 'robs'; while for 'Wie rät ein Untergang dem nächsten?' she selects the far less ordinary phrase: 'How does one demise advise the next?' thus capturing a near-echo. Such a gift proves true throughout this all-in-all inventive rendering. The extraordinary Meret Oppenheim deserves no less!\"--Mary Ann Caws\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.\"--Gary Indiana, Village Voice\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"What makes Meret Oppenheim both fresh and modern is her ability to produce works that express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.\"-- Herald Tribune\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoetry. Art. Women's Studies. Translation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40530737627159,"sku":"9781954218086","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781954218086.jpg?v=1679172649"},{"product_id":"lerner-ben-the-lightshb","title":"Lerner, Ben: The Lights (HC)","description":"\u003cp\u003eFarrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 5, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School. Ben Lerner's The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to \"the real forces at work in the popular\" and \"the wind in the poplars,\" \"the blue glow of the screen\" and \"the snow blue in the light.\" Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, the poems ultimately communicate—in their unpredictability, in their intensities—the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40554194042903,"sku":"9780374279219","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_fb1cc9f8-4ee3-4964-9309-68cfcaa1ab9e.jpg?v=1681940335"},{"product_id":"vitale-ida-time-withopb","title":"Vitale, Ida: Time Without Keys","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew Directions, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Sarah Pollack\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 4, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The celebrated writer Álvaro Mutis envied new readers of Ida Vitale's poetry: \"unexpected pleasures await them.\" \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTime Without Keys: Selected Poems\u003c\/em\u003e is the first volume of Vitale's illustrious poetry to appear in the US. 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Winner of The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (Poetry), The Choice is Real is a romp through millennial media landscapes and an interrogation of their power as systems of early childhood gender programming.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChallenging the conventions of how queer and trans people are encouraged to tell their stories, The Choice is Real engages the concept of choice in queerness and trivializes the linear “born-this-way” narratives that queer people are sold. In response to a second puberty brought on by medical transition and an unravelling of family structures following the death of their stepmother, Keery regresses through a warped and foreboding childhood landscape saturated with pop culture iconography. Writing with and against Disney classics, Keery moves between formative memories and contemporary moments, weaving in accounts of current relations in their playful uprooting of assumptions of queer relationality. 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Each poem is a kaleidoscope of shedding and remembrance where objects become subjects wrapped in secular prayer. We are on the move (free falling at times) as we are reminded of all that matters and wears away. Lease continues to gift his readers with vulnerability, music and truth.\"—Xochiquetzal Candelaria\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Joseph Lease's FIRE SEASON, composed in the heat of global and personal apocalypse, is one of the most intimate books I've ever encountered. 'I'm writing inside death, I'm \/ in the room.' Anyone who comes this close to death succumbs to its power to eradicate all pretense. Lease's language is simple, direct: 'what is real \/ (maybe sunlight \/ (my mother's face.' Words reappear like recurring dreams, brilliantly embodying Jack Spicer's dictum: 'A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.' 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If real poems have any future at all, that future begins here.\"—Donald Revell\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40697031327767,"sku":"9781946104472","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781946104472.jpg?v=1698268092"},{"product_id":"w4g-abu-al-hayyat-maya-you-can-be-the-last-leaf-selected-poems","title":"[B4G] Abu Al-Hayyat, Maya: You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: May 10, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArt. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected \/ by the gate, \/ blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli colonial rule.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now \/ as you coerce your kids to sleep \/ in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans \/ to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war \/ that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eYou Can Be the Last Leaf\u003c\/em\u003e, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Book proceeds","offer_id":41543095255063,"sku":"9781571315403","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Book + $10","offer_id":41543095287831,"sku":"9781571315404","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Book + $25","offer_id":41543095320599,"sku":"9781571315405","price":41.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Book + $50","offer_id":41543095353367,"sku":"9781571315406","price":66.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_46.gif?v=1633731270"},{"product_id":"w4g-simpson-leanne-betasamosake-noopiming","title":"[B4G] Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake: Noopiming","description":"\u003cp\u003eUniversity of Minnesota Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 8, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The new novel from the author of \u003ci\u003eAs We Have Always Done\u003c\/i\u003e, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's \u003ci\u003eNoopiming\u003c\/i\u003e braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMashkawaji (they\/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator's will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimpson's book \u003ci\u003eAs We Have Always Done\u003c\/i\u003e argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. \u003ci\u003eNoopiming\u003c\/i\u003e (Anishinaabemowin for \"in the bush\") enacts these ideas. The novel's characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. 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His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.\"—Naomi Shihab Nye\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Mosab Abu Toha's elegant and unforgettable poetry calls me to celebrate the struggle to survive. Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Milosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.\"—Mary Karr\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. 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