Take a Breath catapults you right into the frenzy spiral of Yakir Ben-Moshe's dating life. Against the backdrop of violence, war, and trauma that has always permeated Israeli society and shaped the personal as well as the political discourse, the round dance of lovers entering and exiting and re-entering the poet's life takes on a timeless quality. The passionate vows and furious arguments between Ben-Moshe and his girlfriends, their break-ups and lovemaking in sweltering and noisy Tel Aviv are both a respite from and a mirror of the upheaval and breathlessness of day-to...
The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of "Labor Poems," Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in the machine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming...
“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement, a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. Richly researched, the book explores how...
Poetry. The poems in MOUTHS attempt the impossible task of speaking outside human language and after the end of human life. That they always already fail to do so is thematized in chafing refrains, syntactic disjunctions, and the accusatory second person pronoun, which addresses at once the reader and the poetry's own uncomfortable materiality. MOUTHS is a manifestation of apocalyptic lyric: experimental, eco-critical, and feminist, its varied forms span human, animal, and insect in ever-shifting relationships of speech, song, eros, and consumption. MOUTHS addresses the...
Oil Spell gathers many of today’s dark energies—US drone strikes, environmental disaster—and asks: what kind of tool is poetry to mirror these violences? Oil Spell animates diverse influences—Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, environmental reports of extinction and endangerment, and the Pakistani government assessments of drone strikes. Oil Spell performs the ways in which narratives of loss and narratives of everyday joy curl into one another and mutually contaminate. The beauty that results is a troubled reflection, like a rainbow in a slick of oil.
In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to...
In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work's stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez...
In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home. The book’s title comes from the word for a bit of cartilage on a baby bird’s beak, a growth that helps it break out of the egg. Shortly after the bird hatches, the tooth disappears. Like an eggtooth, Nathan’s poems are often figures for the violence of birth and, in his case, rebirth. They follow an unusual and passionate boy from his childhood on a wheat farm in the watershed of the Running Turkey Creek in rural southcentral Kansas...
In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.
Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art—our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic—is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests...
“Eggtooth,” Jesse Nathan’s debut poetry collection, is alert to the wonderful and terrible things that happen beneath our feet.
In a poem titled “In a Churchyard After Dark, with Ruth,” friends “lounge in a burr oak’s buttress-root couch.” In “Between States,” the “grass sea” of the 19th century Midwest is stolen from Indigenous Americans. In “Boy With Thorns,” a locust tree’s spike — “evolved to ward off long gone / mammoths” — pierces “my plantar fascia’s rivers / of tissue.”
Nathan’s ear for language and eye for the intersection of natural splendor and trauma are...
