Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In this book, Diana Hamilton extends her previous explorations of ethics and techniques of self-control (OKAY, OKAY and Some Shit Advice) onto the fraught terrain of authorship and selfhood: in two long pieces, THE AWFUL TRUTH draws with wry seriousness on psychoanalytic theory, film criticism, memoir, and self-help literature to interrogate contemporary bromides drawn from philosophy, online forums, CBT, and Women's Health alike. Part homage to influences like Bernadette Mayer, part restless meditation on love and identity, "Write in Your Sleep" is a verse 'annotated bibliography' in which the narrator ardently catalogs her dreams in an attempt to discover a link between life and art that dodges both. In the second piece, a novella titled "Fear and Trembling," a woman who styles herself a therapeutic innovator forces her friends to re-enact Hollywood classics, only to be rebuffed by one friend's adaptation of Kierkegaard as paranoiac sci-fi erotica centered around a Bartleby-esque refusal to perform free emotional labor. With a keen sense of both the consolations and the limits of the various genres that animate her work, Hamilton surveys the semiotic scramble of 21st-century subjectivity--obsessions with health and productivity, privacy and commodification--and lays bare the masochism implicit in moralistic imperatives to improve ourselves and to capitalize (literally) on our repressions. "We need, they say, 'a machine for fighting anxiety' that would allow us to act out of desire rather than fear. Hamilton's book is a utopia of sharing and listening that exceeds social norms--that reorients our fears about the world into desire for our friends and for our lovers and for a better world for us all."--Marie Buck

The Awful Truth

Literature & Fiction

Hamilton, Diana

Poetry

Golias Books

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. The poetic worlds of Michael Field are as surprising and inventive, as formally rigorous, and as deeply felt and lived as when they were composed over a century ago. The expansive selection of poems presented here spans Field's thirty-year career and a wide range of formal gambits and registers, from erotic reconstructions of Sapphic verse fragments and ekphrastic reveries over Grand Tour oil paintings to theologically freighted odes, sonnets of rural retirement, and elegies to their beloved pet Chow Chow. With a new biographical essay by the editors and an inviting foreword by Stacy Szymaszek to ground the work in our contemporary moment, this volume brings the unorthodox lives and vital, protean writing of Michael Field--as lovers, collaborators, experimenters in poetic form, aesthetic community, and queer kinship--to a new audience. "Field's work is organized around body logic, experience, making a spectacle of one's own life, beauty and giving pleasure. In the grips of our current political disaster, it may not carry a lot of weight to think one's work is important for such things. Yet work that excites my mind-body helps remind me that I am an erotic being. When I proceed through life as my best erotic self, I am harder for the law to control. When I am harder for the law to control, i.e., making a spectacle of myself, others can see me. There is always the hope that Emily Dickinson expressed: 'Are you nobody too?' I step out of convention for community, and that action is the enemy of fascism."--from the forward by Stacy Szymaszek

Precious against a Precious Thing: The Selected Poems of Michael Field

FIELD, MICHAEL

Poetry. In LABOR DAY--a long serial poem in fifty-six parts--Rebecca Kosick pursues a series of movements in and out of the natural and economic landscapes of the postindustrial Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century, attempting to incarnate a language adequate to memory, a memory adequate to place. Kosick's verse modulates from auratic to frank, stately to aching, its presiding recollective mood accumulating like a mist over a warming landscape: scattered homophones peer up through layers of sediment, once-familiar terrain is eroded by diluvial, counterintuitive etymologies. The rhetorical layering of LABOR DAY is memory's residue, a "paused emptiness of season" that freezes an instant only to watch it dissolve under charged scrutiny. There is something here of the animistic sociability and glancing observation of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, offset by a strain of Hopkins's providential empiricism, a tender attunement to inscape whose materiality can take a sudden Steinian swerve into resonant disaggregation. While formally hovering on this threshold between lyric excavation and sonic concreteness, the poems unfold in a georgic, postindustrial reality in which haleness retires each day only an arms-length from hardship. Held in counterpoise by disrupted cycles of care, riven efforts against forgetting, LABOR DAY becomes the genius loci it sets out to summon, constructing--not unambivalently--a sonic space to stand for those places that memory can't reconstruct.

Labor Day

Kosick, Rebecca

Poetry. Named for a fast-food sandwich and written during rounds of chemo, Ted Rees's second book is a poem comprising 498 linked haiku and sent coursing through the "cemetery / Of repressed anguish" that is America. The haiku form, which should dilate into bowers of momentous stillness, succumbs in Rees's narrative extrusion to a torrential historicity: the poem moves at the relentless pace of a police scanner, dream-fed on Cinnabon and petroleum byproducts, a stream of consciousness that is at once revenue stream, live stream, blood stream, click stream, stream dammed to flood and tapped for bottled water. The old transparent eyeball and anaphoric "I" of the pioneer imaginary, profligate as Johnny Appleseed sowing virgin lands with exclamation points, are bounced as trappings of colonial venturing. Rees's "wild mad" song counters the barbarism of the imperial yawp, burrowing underneath the remote-investment realtyscape of payday loan franchises, strip-mall churches, and detention centers doubling as urgent care clinics. If not precisely hopeful, the poem hints at the isolated prospect of relations running counter to accumulation, of affect eluding capture, of guarded solidarity among those sheltering in the crooks and crannies of blasted overburden: preteen pyros torching lilacs in the dooryard, dropouts lighting out for the backcountry, and militant recusants disappearing into abandoned office parks. THANKSGIVING is a queer and delirious poem of making do in the long tail of empire.

Thanksgiving: A Poem

Rees, Ted

THE PASOLINI BOOK documents the poet Stacy Szymaszek's engagement with the work of the Italian film director, poet, and political figure Pier Paolo Pasolini alongside her own evolving vocation as civic poet and dissenting subject within an American polis by turns hostile and hospitable. Extending the exploration of the temporally unbound, genderqueer, and disaster-prone persona of her earlier works, this volume collects two successive iterations of "felt translations," poem-for-poem rewritings, channelings, and détournements, of Pasolini's Roman Poems, undertaken over a decade apart. Separating the two suites of poems are three iterations of autofiction titled "A Sentimental Education," in which Szymaszek's Midwestern upbringing is recentered and transformed through speculative identification with Pasolini. The Pasolini Book evidences a search for a civic poetry in which the poet does not contain multitudes so much as she exudes an abundant and experimental identity emerging from long experience seeking political and artistic solidarities on the margins of institutional life. "We are all in danger," Pasolini said in an interview only hours before he was murdered; today, in the midst of capitalist ruin, Szymaszek's poetry maps the particular pains of embattled artistic autonomy and the turbulent state of social and political community. 
Poetry. Italian Studies. Art. LGBTQ+ Studies.

The Pasolini Book

Szymaszek, Stacy

Literary