We Are Nothing and So Can You We Are Nothing and So Can You is a book-length poem for the long 21st century to come, a poem of revolts past, present, and future. In alternating passages of rhapsodic verse and speculative prose, Bernes plots the dynamic movement of history, both irreversible and recursive, moving forward directly and by twists and turns, in sentences and lines, standing still and hurtling toward the abyss. This is an epic for an age without heroes save collective heroes, leaping from the occupied plazas and rioting cities of the aughts and teens to futures alternately desolate and full of promise.I think this is one of the poem’s great achievementsto write a description of a post-revolutionary moment that isn’t a utopia; to use techniques that orbit wider than realism, while looping through a descriptive realism nonetheless. This is beyond the resources of realist fiction when it tries to think about capitalism. The best dystopian science fiction, meanwhile, when it tries to extend capitalism into the future, tends to invite allegorical readings that, while pleasurable, usually lose sight of the thing Bernes has kept our gaze on all the while: the conditions of production under capital, the ones that make us merely 'programmable,' make us just sad apes.” Chris Nealon, The Price of Value” (forthcoming 2016)From We Are Nothing and So Can YouAs for the rest of us, we learnsomething important about ourselveswatching from the loading dockas the mushroom cloudannounces the end of another seasone.g., that each riot really isan assemblage of other riotswashed up on the boulevards,from whose faded corpsesone dresses and arms one’s comradesthe total inadequacy of whichas equipment for the task at handtraces out in negativethe seat perilous of the party historicalthe poetry of the futurewhose sweet new soundswill fill with meaning slowlywhile the seas rise.

We Are Nothing and So Can You

Literature & Fiction

Bernes, Jasper

Poetry

Commune Editions

Red Epic invents a volatile poetry for a world on fire, written to illuminate the wreckage of the most recent gilded age. Leaping levels from global systems to street fights and back again, accompanied by a Top 40 soundtrack full of Robyn and M.I.A., it remixes utopian hope and revolutionary antagonism.
Lauded by sources from Judith Butler to Entertainment Weekly, Joshua Clover's poetry has received multiple honors including a Village Voice book of the year. He has written four books and contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and GQ; his column "Pop and Circumstance" appears in the Nation. He teaches at the University of California Davis.

Red Epic

Clover, Joshua

That Winter the Wolf Came is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.
 "In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it." Los Angeles Review of Books
"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems." The Nation
"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority." Publisher’s Weekly
 Excerpt: It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.

That Winter the Wolf Came

SPAHR, Juliana

Born of a rigorous criticism of the toxicity of the economic system, this collection of experimental, socially conscious poetry reflects a world in crisis. It mobilizes scenes of struggle and instances of solidarity, from Occupy to Mexico's drug war, from Cairo to Athens. Linguistically daring, full of exigency, these poems are as damaged as life, still dirty. David Lau has been involved in the poetry, art, and activist communities of Los Angeles and the Bay Area for the past decade. A lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and editor of the journal Lana Turner. This is his second book.

Still Dirty: Poems 2009-2015

LAU, DAVID

A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters explores the many forms of mutual aid and possibility that appear in moments of state failure. It maps long and complicated equations, taking us from Katrina to the prisoners at Riker's Island as they await Hurricane Sandy. It understands and explains disaster as a collective system, the state as precarious, and community as both fundamental and necessary.
Cheena Marie Lo, born in Manapla, Philippines, is a genderqueer poet based in Oakland, California. They currently coordinate a youth art program at California College of the Arts and co-edit the literary journal HOLD.

A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters

Lo, Cheena Marie

"One of the most important poets in Scandinavia."—Kamilla Löfström, InformationAt once practical handbook, philosophical inquiry, and series of fables set in Putin's Russia, The Sabotage Manuals throws a wrench into the machinery of contemporary language, generating strange solidarities between saboteurs past and present. Sourced from political pamphlets and factory workers' diaries, Börjel's profound poem allows for the most expansive (and explosive) sense of sabotage.Ida Börjel's first book, Sond (2004), received the prestigious award Katapultpriset. Since then, she has written over six works, including Skåneradio, Konsumentköplagen: juris lyrik, and MA.

Miximum Ca' Canny the Sabotage Manuals

Börjel, Ida

Nanni Balestrini is the most significant writer of Italy's revolutionary period in the sixties and seventies, comparable only to Pier Paolo Pasolini. Blackout is the first book of his poetry available in English. Written immediately after he was indicted by Italian authorities and forced to flee, it has at its center the great New York blackout of 1977, a moment of chaos and panic, but also of mutual aid and social solidarity. This comes to stand in for the years from 1968–1979 in Italy, when a more or less open civil war between popular militants and the state escalated from strikes and riots to armed struggle. At once documentary and visionary, it is a poem of heroic and daily struggles for freedom, captured in heroic and daily language. It is a poem of popular revolt being crushed, a poem for our era as well as his.
Nanni Balestrini, born in Milan in 1935, was member of the avant-garde literary movement Gruppo 63 with Eduardo Sanguinetti and Umberto Eco. He is the author of numerous books, including the novels The Unseen and We Want Everything, and his history of the movement of '77, L'orda d'oro (written with Sergio Bianchi). He lives in Rome.
Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014) and the translator of numerous works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Antonin Artaud, and others. His translation of Artraud's late letters is forthcoming from City Lights.

Blackout

Balestrini, Nanni

"Heriberto Yepez is one of the most active and protean writers of his generation." — Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
"A forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries." —Los Angeles Review of Books
Famous for picking fights with a range of writers, both living and dead, Tijuana author Heriberto Yépez is in full provocateur-mode in this collection of work written in English over the last fifteen years. An explosive, genre-bending Molotov cocktail of poetic critique.
Heriberto Yépez is the author of A.B.U.R.T.O., Al Otro Lado, and The Empire of Neomemory, among other books. He lives in Tijuana, Mexico.

Transnational Battle Field

Yépez, Heriberto

On one level, Special Subcommittee is an experimental family history of Samuel Solomon's communist, labor-organizer grandparents, told through the sterile language of redacted FBI files and transcripts of congressional hearings. Against these subcommittees of repression, he then invents an ardent and committed lyric of queer communist relation revolving around his chosen family: his friends, lovers, and political comrades. The combination is wild, radical, and subversive.Samuel Solomon is the author of Life of Riley and the co-translator of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin. He teaches at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.

Special Subcommittee

SOLOMON, SAMUEL

IIn 1968, Leslie Kaplan, a young American poet living in France, went to work in a factory. This was the Maoist practice of établissement, an effort toward helping form a revolutionary proletariat core. Excess—The Factory is about those years, about working class resistance to capitalism, about the possibility of a worker-led revolution, and about the '68 general strike in France. It has struck many readers (including French luminaries Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras) as a unique event in writing, at once legendary and all but lost to history. This long overdue translation in English by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, true to the original's spare, descriptive tone, returns the book and its complex moment to new readers.

Excess--The Factory

Kaplan, Leslie

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