Poetry. "When you pick up PINK &amp; HOT PINK HABITAT go directly to the table of contents, look at the titles there, you want to read the poems called by these names, then go to the first poem, being afraid is a good thing, then go to 'Watch the Village,' and then find the poem where it's written 'we do not need a / country. We can destroy ourselves here.' Somewhere in these pages Lyalin writes, 'I start the time machine.' Well, she does, and the heart machine and the brain machine, her poems can go anywhere, and they choose to go where it matters. These poems are gorgeous, surprising, full of necessary knowledge and feeling."—Dara Wier "Natalie Lyalin's poems are animated by an urgent, slightly deranged whisper. In the dead of night, when the inane games have finally ended and the 'normal' kids are all asleep in their bunks, she calls over to you (Are you awake? Can you hear?). She's asking you to shake off your sleeping bag and go out into that pink and hot pink habitat to commune with the headless boy birds, the beaver humans, and the ghost of Otto Frank. I suggest you do it."—Travis Nichols "In PINK &amp; HOT PINK HABITAT, Natalie Lyalin makes heat. The pages and words rub at each other to make something more than fire, more like a bomb, more like a thousand bombs going off at once. This poet is more than bombmaker though. She herself is the bomb she constructs and sets off upon your reading. In these poems, Lyalin enacts the old work of Flaubert that 'The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.' When you are done with this book, your own life is more than bombed out. It is more than a 'dusty' 'gem' sitting in front of you because '[y]our family is in flight.' You yourself are transformed into a bird rising out of the fire, a 'Miniature Life of a Raven,' where Lyalin has made 'stars for your teeth,' where your old ideas are nothing more than 'ancient dust on velvet.'"—Dorothea Lasky

Pink & Hot Pink Habitat

Literature & Fiction

Lyalin, Natalie

Poetry

Coconut Books

Poetry. "Reading Gina Myers is like the pleasure of listening to the most quiet notes in Morty Feldman's music. It's a green music where everything is convincing, simply refined and secretly fiery. The poetry seems to have taken a polygraph test and has the truthfulness of an injured voice. Photographs of loving are here and also the very global shifts between her Michigan and her New York. It's humble and observant as the figurative art of Schuyler, but there is always a funny pointillism that points to nothing except love without hope. A whole year in single sighs, the scale being life-size: a world of yes and no, a long poem in arpeggios, and full disclosure as a fear and poetics."—David Shapiro "Gina Myers's A MODEL YEAR contains more grace, precision, and wisdom than I've encountered in one place for some time. Myers writes with a melancholic confidence that is all her won, but which also pays homage to an exquisite assortment of ghosts, poetic and otherwise. 'We each have our own word for loneliness,' she writes, and her poems relentlessly chart the contours of emptiness, stasis, silence, and longing. Their sadness is everywhere laced, however, with inspiring, life-sustaining forms of honesty and generosity. 'I'd like to give all the quiet things to you,' Myers writes—and here, in pitch-perfect language, in poem after poem, she does."—Maggie Nelson "In A MODEL YEAR damaged objects abound: chipped picture frames, rusted shopping carts, crushed beer cans, people. In her first collection, Gina Myers deftly shows us how one person's trash might still be trash, but continue to serve a physical or emotional function. It's as if you came upon WCW's wheelbarrow after someone took a sledgehammer to it and scattered the chickens. Even though the wheelbarrow is dented and warped, you still need something to cary your baggage."—Dustin Williamson "Gina Myers's remarkable ear and her New York School sprezzatura can transform the consciousness in any room. She is one of the strongest of the new poets, and her brilliant book is a gift to us all."—Joseph Lease

A Model Year

Myers, Gina

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "A princess starts a hotel fire. How to survive? Become a poet. Become Angela Veronica Wong. 'How we remember is formed like glass,' she writes. How we remember—survive and remember. 'I placed a book upside down on your piano,' the poet writes. It is this book, formed like music. Read it."—Honor Moore "Asphyxiation, falling plants, and abandoned buildings—this is just the beginning of Angela Veronica Wong's debut collection which is both an exploration and a meditation of intimacy and its fracturing. Playing children 'scream like death,' there are 'black cliffs' and traces of mascara on pillowcases the day after. These poems embrace mythologies and enact fairy tales as a stand-in for disappointment and rejections. As the collection moves through scenes of domesticity and urban life, there's a subtle shifting away (but never a complete departure) from youthful naïveté into a quiet violence and desperation of one who knows too much. HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE is our tender riot and slow sad swan song, as we lie awake watching an empty street fill with sleet."—Steven Karl "I love the way each section in Angela Veronica Wong's HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE shifts from form to form. There's a protean urgency in the way her work flickers on the page and morphs from section to section. What this collection offers isn't so much the answer to its title, but a type of slow burning inferno. One that reminds us our lives are interminably, inescapably, beautifully burning down."—Ben Mirov

how to survive a hotel fire

Wong, Angela Veronica

Poetry. "The body 'being' in sun, the gaze at rain, teleology inside the house—with these strokes and compasses, Megan Kaminski deftly configures a desiring map, across seacoasts and Kansas plains, through leaves, roots, movements of light. Here a quieter but not quietist America emerges where life's precarity holds—there is a relation between the natural world and neural capacity—as we are pulled into syntax's own search and quizzicality, its seeking to find a place for the I that only momentarily settles before it dislodges again, uncovering questions, finding parts of speech or weeds that answer. 'Speech lies in the break on the river edge,' the poem says: 'subtle splendor.'"—Erin Mouré "Megan Kaminski's book is hauntingly quiet, but not silent, just as 'teleology is not silent.' The book is in some ways the teleology of imagism, realizing itself late in history and bursting into jagged pieces, having been dragged through 'some saffron metropolis' and the long summer of the great plains. It is a book that approaches us cannily, drenched in form, never word-spent and never without cocktails; a 21st century pleasure with a keen eye on the terrain and something to say."—Joshua Clover "One of the best books I've read this year, Megan Kaminski's DESIRING MAP melds landscape to mind-to heart-to breath-with some of the most subtly effective melopoeia I've ever encountered in any book of poems. Use it as a dowsing rod, as I've been doing, to find the brain's poetic reuptake pump, and to get it moving again."—Joseph Massey

Desiring Map

Kaminski, Megan

Poetry. "The apparent velocity of Reynolds's poetry, the physical charges directed into her materials, and the emphatic but relatively spare diction are always believable. Even, or maybe especially, when filtered through what turn out to be surprisingly flexible thematic terms such as revenge and mirage. That elementary principle of organization in any art that nothing gets in anything else's way, and everything is at its own limit of possibilities, is realized, for me, in the way the poems handle intimate immediacy: through a willful, concise, and thoughtfully layered balance of plea and affect."—Anselm Berrigan"Christie Ann's poems have this brilliant severity about them. Instead of trying to disarm the reader with intimations of easy escape they make false attempts at disentanglement read like a form of existential disavowal, as if the whole world would go flickering out if it had to suffer through another specious evasion. This work refuses that extinguishing completely, delivering against it a charged & complex form of lyric revenge marked by loss, recrimination & resilience."—Dana Ward

Revenge for Revenge

Reynolds, Christie Ann

Poetry. "I've never come across a book with the conceit of Boully's latest, which explicitly presents 'poetic failures,'—'embarrassments, short-comings, and all'—written over the course of many years, mostly in thrall to the existential condition she aptly terms 'pining.' Her conclusion, which comes after waves of diverse poetic experiments have crashed and receded, is that 'nothing written will bring love.' It is a wise and unusual finding in a book filled with delicacy and resilience."—Maggie Nelson "The speaker in these poems has been listening to our thoughts for years and transforming them into this book, which chronicles failures and their manifestations—the shiny things, the ephemera of what could have been. Jenny Boully is one of my favorite writers because of how much care she takes with language and with truth. This stunning collection highlights her incredible range as a poet. It is a breathtaking addition to her body of work."—Carmen Giménez Smith "The imagery of Jenny Boully's OF THE MISMATCHED TEACUPS, OF THE SINGLE-SERVING SPOON lurks somewhere in the filmic senses among Buñuel and Brakhage, mashing the natural and the metaphysical and the dreamed-of and the remembered-without-why. 'Night is urgent,' she writes amidst a text packed tight with bodies waiting among messed up road maps, waiting to be found, touched, loved. Later: 'I like to blame all of this on the time of year.' When the nausea meds and mushrooms and beers are not enough, these poems are nice and bright like knives, some shells to fit over your face and breathe with."—Blake Butler

of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures

Boully, Jenny

Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Elizabeth P. Braddock Prize for Poetry. "In DUST JACKET, Alexis Orgera sits down in the middle of the earth, and watches it revolve around her and all of us—any way the wind blows, sunny Alexis! Then she writes some sentences, and the world becomes a series of lush and fitful paragraphs ascending the ragged mountains, receding into the distance, peeling back the surfaces and skins of consciousness, and going deep into the hum of our uncommonest human fire. These prose poems almost burn themselves up as you read them, lighting your way through the dust-covered darkness."—Matt Hart "DUST JACKET's prose poems, if that is what they are!, are zany, frightening, exhilarating, brilliant. They operate in a landscape where a little girl is 'the secret cousin of lava fields,' in a journey where the 'drive itself creates the most beautiful syntax, the sunset – amber – is a reflection of the sentences you speak on your way down.' Misadventures and the wildly discomfiting desires we suffer and live by inform every electrifying page. Alexis Orgera is an original, one of our most exciting new poets."—Gail Mazur

Dust Jacket

Orgera, Alexis

Poetry. "Emily Toder's BEACHY HEAD brims with electrical currents flying backwards and forwards, with the force of poems that have been well fought out and felt. I hear the currents of Alice Notley, of Bernadette Mayer, of Eileen Myles, and Sylvia Plath, through the book, with its sharp wit and grace, with its 'separate set of physics' and the 'venerable uphill' of music that this great poet has at her disposal. I am so happy that this book is here, because I want to share it with all of my friends, so that we may spread the currents this poet has made for us into the air, and everywhere."—Dorothea Lasky  "Emily Toder writes as if we achieve reality only through speech, as if we harbor reality in what we make & beyond that is the void, all dangerous with rusty nails & magazine articles. Her poems make direct & furious eye contact with the reader, pushing lines into the reader's eyes like a moth in reverse until the boundaries between emotions & objects & prosody break down into primordial elements of love, freedom, & making."—Mathias Svalina "BEACHY HEAD is a book of great expanses, big numbers, repetition, and slow real time. As I read it, I get to thinking that I want to think about things as they really are. I can detect feelings in myself and can detect my own mind. Each poem is more important than the last. Then I want to reread the whole book. No one is forcing me to say this. These are just really good poems. I've never written a blurb thinking, 'I can't wait for this book to be published so that I can get a copy and read it some more,' and this very honestly is what I am thinking."—Lucy Ives

Beachy Head

Toder, Emily

History & Criticism

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "'I wanted to be a priori but I was processed meat.' In Ji Yoon Lee's evisceral-guidebook-cum- cautionary-tale, roadkill reassembles itself into a zombie-dolly, her head screwed to the mouth of a gun, and through this megaphone does battle with the smug autocorrectors guarding English's/the Internet's gates. Language becomes so distressed it eats its own fingers, it makes the datestamp second guess itself, normative syntax shreds to a slasher film, Time a snuff. 'My splice sentence had its guts spilling out.' Lee's sic text, her tic idiolect, is contagious, vectored by the inequity and the iniquity that make the world go round. Coming attractions, I'm coming! The uncanny, now in cans."—Joyelle McSweeney "FOREIGNER'S FOLLY is a bastard child of English, a frolicking anti-colonial translation machine."—Don Mee Choi "Can the 'mommy- simulator' speak? This is a book I've been waiting for! This 'elegy concert' for communication (in the tradition of Theresa Cha and Myung Mi Kim but also Chelsey Minnis and Ara Shirinyan) is painfully funny, vividly cartoon-violent, brilliant and gorgeously paced. At last we have the 'Attempted Project' that demonstrates the failure of each success and the success of every failure of assimilation, exposing the power dynamic of those terms. It's a set of sequences to read aloud, for consolation and encouragement—for who here hasn't 'become an apologizing machine' in the mastery of language... a mastery which is, of course, an enslavement? 'I can't speak without sounding injured'—as the poet notes—and these poems make a space to laugh!"—Laura Mullen

Foreigner's Folly: A Tale of Attempted Project

Lee, Ji Yoon

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Jennifer Tamayo's riotous new book, YOU DA ONE, alarms and entrances me. Alarms because of its take-no-prisoners exploration of how the logic and graphics of the internet, with all its distracting, capitalist garbage, interpenetrates our emotional lives; entrances because of its ENGLUSH, its defiant, often stunning provocations, rejoinders, and reclamations, its wild lunges from sincerity to melodrama to cynicism to 'shimmerwound.' Like it or not, the landscape of YOU DA ONE is where many of us now reckon with our families, beloveds, languages, heritages, desires, and self-images; Jennifer Tamayo here announces herself as a fearless, even reckless guide."—Maggie Nelson "Jennifer Tamayo's corrosive, excrementally beautiful new book takes place around two key phrases from Rihanna—'you da one' and 'what's my name'—that could represent the very stabilizing dynamics of the symbolic order: the 'one' tells the narrator who she is. But in a violently mediated, liquified world (shot through with internet ads for drugs and sex), the identity of 'da one' is catastrophically ambiguous (Lover or father? Dead or alive?) and the question 'what's my name' has multiple valences: Is it a threat or a seduction? Hysterical or beligerent? Halfway through the book, Tamayo asks 'Have you had enough yet?' I have not. I keep going even if it damages me, especially if it damages me. It damages me. Tamayo has written a violent, desperate and absorbing book. Don't hate her for her jouissance."—Johannes Goransson

YOU DA ONE

Tamayo, Jennifer

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