Poetry. Introduction by John Beer. Joel Craig's poems first reach out with quiet Midwestern sincerity—precise craft mixed with personal invention—but quickly thicken: "Let me try to lay out what I think I understand" leads to "Las Vegas / and the end of Western history." Ethical without being political, popular without being pop, personal without being sentimental, Craig sings of how we are "stuck near a river / [we] can feel the evidence of / but can't imagine." Filled with elegies to aging rock 'n' rollers, explorations of skipping romance, and studied frustration with the world as it appears (and a sincere belief that quiet hands, by themselves, can change it), Craig's book doesn't so much demand as much as call out to the reader, in sequence like an all-night deejay party, with time to dance, time to rest, time to go to the bar and get a refill, or outside for a quick cigarette, hitting on someone on the way back in, hoping to strut, step and swing with them.

The White House

Literature & Fiction

Craig, Joel

Poetry

Green Lantern Press

Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. "Like us, palm trees are imports, and seem to come from everywhere but here," writes a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in an article lamenting the dying days of the once-ubiquitous palm trees of L.A. Named for those iconic imported exotics that flank the boulevards of America's strangest city, PALM TREES is a collection of poems characterized by a revved-up, ruminative musicality, and it issues its swan song in a voice that channels the restless globalism of America in the new century. The poems shuttle from airport to boardroom, boardroom to living room, making the kind of foreboding observations that might issue from a drug-addled and paranoid Delphic Oracle.

Palm Trees

Twemlow, Nick

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Urban Studies. Psychogeography. In 2010, Chicago- based artist Hui-min Tsen led a series of free, guided tours through the Chicago Pedway—a circuitous and ever-changing route of indoor passageways throughout Chicago's downtown. Using the Pedway one need never step outside; it links train stations, skyscrapers, civic departments and department stores, containing enough pedestrian traffic to host small, underground businesses as well. Unique for its ad hoc nature, Tsen used the Pedway system to speculate on the various and changing Utopic visions that have shaped not only Chicago's city development, but also American culture. This book is the culminating synopsis of that artistic tour. With this 2-color, accordion fold artist book, one can—for the very first time—follow the same journey independently on foot, or while seated before a fire, in a comfortable living room chair.

The Pedway of Today

Tsen, Hui-min

History & Criticism

Art. Design. DIDACTICS by Sonnenzimmer (the Chicago- based art studio of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi) is a collection of two out of print self- released artists' publications combined anew. Pairing Warp and Weft: Poster Construction (2012) and Formal Additive Programs (2010), Sonnenzimmer opens a window into their creative process, while expanding the canon of compositional practice related to both art and design. With this new iteration, the design studio contends with the duality of improvisation and formulated outcomes, while striving for the poetic and pragmatic in their approach to the visual field. While the first part of the book focuses on past poster work with a pragmatic and in-depth project breakdown (clients include the National, the Books, Mouse on Mars, etc), the second, Formal Additive Programs, aims to make a case for composing images through concise programs that embrace conscious flow.

Didactics

Sonnenzimmer

Arts & Photography

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Art. Film. Ecology. THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE explores current representations of the body in which the human figure appears fragmented, distorted, or emphatically absent in a carefully curated selection of poetry, translation, essays, and exhibition documentation. With a mission statement provided by an artist's corporation, to a poem about corpses, and an essay about how Billy the Kid changed American mythology, these works emphasize the strange and residual power of material bodies, distorted and skewed through representation. It is produced in conjunction with a group exhibition of the same name. Contributiors include Antibody Corporation, Rebecca Beachy, Érik Bullot, Judith Goldman, Julia Drescher, Every house has a door (Matthew Goulish &amp; Lin Hixson), Christy LeMaster, Valeria Luiselli, Jesse Malmed, CJ Martin, Nathanaël, Caroline Picard, Martine Syms, John Tipton, Zoe Todd, and Fo Wilson. "This stunning new artist's book from The Green Lantern Press engages with questions of the self and the body, through art, literature and performance. Caroline Picard's opening essay takes the image of bodies left on Mt Everest as a way into our sense (or refusal) of a collective body — composed, as it must be of new (new) corpses. Martine Syms' car is stolen, leading her toward an elegant examination of the how our stuff is not just part of who we are, it is who we are; Valeria Luiselli channels Benjamin (&amp; other literary ghosts) for a 21st century bibliophile, ordering her own bookshelves in a meditation on what it means, for instance, to be a person who cuts a photo of Duras from the newspaper, and tucks it into a notebook as a souvenir. The book attests to the link between such otherwise banal human activity: that of losing and saving and losing again. Each contribution becomes a moment for art-making, a chance (as is climbing past the corpse named Green Boots) to mark our own finitude in the very moment of striving. Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson and Fo Wilson consider the relationship between the human and the non-human, the body in performance as the anti-Idea, or, indeed, encumbrance — here the new corpse becomes a way to break out of a crisis in representation. The emergent self is as unfixed as its body. THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE is a beautiful collection of text and image, and I'll return to it for inspiration again and again." —Suzanne Scanlon "As curators in the most expansive sense, The Green Lantern Press relentlessly aims to refine the bump and tangle of interdisciplinary space, the constant bursts beyond what any given representation can hold. It is an incredibly generous gift to anyone open to receiving it, this space in which rigorous poetic logic prevails. Whether it's by troubling my assumed understandings of something, or drawing connections I hadn't previously recognized, the immersive engagement they consistently bring to their projects makes my mind quicken and my spirit deepen. Disciplines cohabit, objects and events, each thing remaining itself while simultaneously transformed by its proximity to others. And now this continuous rolling act of transformation has become an archive in The New [New] Corpse. Poems, essays, lists and images together aim to show us how to live in a world of objects and how to describe living in a world of objects, how the material and the spirit inform and warp each other." —Tim Kinsella "THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE is more than a catalogue; it's a catalyst for both breaking down the work it represents and building it up again, with a new set of mouths and eyes and skin, allowing it to live a second life. I grabbed a firm hold on a bright thread running through these pieces: that we are composed of what we will ultimately leave behind and this gorgeous object is a perfect example of just that." —Jac Jemc

The New [New] Corpse

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "In these strange, open-eyed, open- hearted, beautiful poems, there is nowhere to stand, or there is everywhere specific. I feel as if I am looking at Borges' aleph: sacred mutating representatives of every category—weather animals language pain geographies software—announce themselves, declare connectednesses I'd never have predicted. This journey, this snake moves through lived experience like breath from the underside of time."—Catherine Wagner

culebra

Harrison, Roberto

Literary Nonfiction. Art. NOTES ON is an a-chronological studio diary that artist Magalie Guérin re- transcribed twice by hand and now in print. Through that active facsimile Guérin documents her painting process, mapping at once her creative history and the way that history consistently transforms. Personal, professional, and creative spheres intersect like simultaneous layers in a painting as accumulated entries capture the shifting gray area between self-doubt, self- awareness, and creative breakthrough. A recurring and parallel "character" in this journal is a hat shape—an abstract form that Guérin paints over and over again. Whether anatomical or abstract, the hat shape becomes an anthropomorphic companion as witness/lover/nemesis to Guérin's artistic endeavors. Guérin shows us not only that a room of one's own is useful, but what can happen when it is utilized.

NOTES ON

Guerin, Magalie

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Environmental Studies. Philosophy. Vegetal life forms are banal in their ubiquity. Undeniably alive, yet silent, they creep upwards, their roots submerged and out of human sight. Like anarchists protesting order, weeds break through concrete. Plants challenge theoretical logic as well; they can be both one and many: Aspen trees growing on a hillside share a single root system. Plants have occupations and desires: engaged in constant growth, they spread out with a will to consume and occupy space. Studies confirm that plants communicate and activate built-in chemical defense mechanisms to ward off predators. Some even move visibly: Mimosa plants close in on themselves when touched by a human finger. This would suggest some kind of sentience, but what would the character of that sentience be? How do we quantify it? IMPERCEPTIBLY AND SLOWLY OPENING highlights the inaccessible subjectivity that plants possess. Featured artists and writers reflect upon plant life as it troubles both physical and ideological human spaces. Contributors include Giovanni Aloi, Kristina Chew, Every house has a door, Brooke Holmes, Karen Houle, Joela Jacobs, Ronald Johnson, Devin King, Eben Kirksey, Deanna Ledezma, Renan Laru-an, Michael Marder, Nathanaël, Chantal Neveu, Mark Payne, Caroline Picard, Catriona Sandilands, Steven Shaviro, Eleni Sikelianos, Monica Westin, &amp; Leila Wilson "The absolute pillar of modern philosophy is the notion that human thought is something ontologically different in kind from everything else. The gap between chunks of iron on one side and chimps and dolphins on the other is supposedly nothing compared to the perilous leap from 'sentient' chimps and dolphins to 'sapient' humans. The present anthology reminds us of just how much may be going on with intelligence outside of humans. This makes it another important contribution to the non-modern philosophy of the future."—Graham Harman "IMPERCEPTIBLY AND SLOWLY OPENING revolutionizes our normalized, indeed 'naturalized' concept of the environment as a choreography of pitched skirmishes and uneasy periods of truce, presided over by the human animal as predator-in-chief. If physics premises its narrative on entropy, portraying the universe as declining inexorably towards heat death, botany may well embrace the opposite principle of vitality, an exuberant, resilient force that expresses itself through diversity. Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening gestures toward possibilities of thought and action that might help us redeem ourselves, as members of a species whose rapacity has driven its home planet to the edge of catastrophe."—Ranjit Hoskote "As with most Green Lantern Press publications, IMPERCEPTIBLY AND SLOWLY OPENING unfolds in intricate evolutions, which in the context of biology and human thought (two ever-adaptable branching systems) is no less discerning on the delicate nature between the nearly imperceptible progressions that constitute viewing, seeing, and experiencing the anthropocene."—Stephanie Cristello "Reading this collection of works about plants is akin to venturing out on a hike through unfamiliar woods. The environment feels familiar and inviting and yet, things are different, unexpected, and sometimes thrilling. The works appear with their own organic logic and cadence. Most importantly, what you receive from them depends to a great deal on what you brought with you to the woods and on how closely and patiently you are willing to look, how open you are to escaping your own expectations or preoccupations. And you'll certainly find spots that you'd hope to return to again some day to seek that fleeting inspiration it offered the first time around."—Chuck Cannon

Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening

Picard, Caroline

Shadowed!

Rothenburg, Ellen

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Introduction by Jane Blocker. 2nd Edition. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion. Layout and design by Sonnenzimmer.

The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure

Goulish, Matthew

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Green Lantern Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Green Lantern Press