The 9/11 Dialogues

Allan Conan

Kenning Editions

Poetry. WHO OPENS is Jesse Seldess's first full-length collection. "It is impossible not to read these poems aloud &, sounded, they are magnificent"—Ron Silliman. "With great compassion and precision, this book returns language to the habitat of sound from which poetry has been away far too long"—Kerri Sonnenberg.

Who Opens

Literature & Fiction

Seldess, Jesse

Poetry

Poetry. "HANNAH WEINER'S OPEN HOUSE beckons us into a realm of poetry that bends consciousness in order to open the doors of perception. Weiner is one of the great American linguistic inventors of the last thirty years of the 20th century. She created an alchemical poetry that transforms the materials of everyday life into a dimension beyond sensory perception. The pieces collected here are as much conceptual art as sprung prose, experimental mysticism as social realism, autobiography as egoless alyric. Patrick Durgin has brought together touchstone works, some familiar and some never before published. HANNAH WEINER'S OPEN HOUSE provides the only single volume introduction to the full range of Weiner's vibrant, enthralling, and unique contribution to the poetry of the Americas."—Charles Bernstein

Hannah Weiner's Open House

Weiner, Hannah

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer. sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre is a bilingual edition of books two and three of the author's lifelong project entitled Dolores Dorantes. Dorantes was born in Cordoba, Veracruz in 1973, and has lived in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua for the past twenty years. She has published four book-length works of poetry in Mexico, and is a founding member of the border arts collective Compaa Frugal (The Frugal Company), which counts among its activities publication of the monthly poetry broadside series Hoja Frugal, printed in editions of4,000 and distributed free throughout Mexico.

Sexopurosexoveloz and Septiembre

Dorantes, Dolores

A rollicking exposé of modern life, Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot is about the unspoken, with aims to represent the voice of an emerging counterculture. The book chronicles the artistic whims and serious-minded endeavors of a band of musicians who record the sounds of parking lots, as they wander the overdeveloped landscape of a city and its suburbs, collaborate with a dance troupe to protest a war that evokes 9/11, and stumble into the sought-after yet volatile public and academic arenas. Crafted with language that alternates between the poetic, witty, outrageous, and tender, Lu's work of fiction moves swiftly from the droll to the compelling, narrated by a "we" that relates the story of not only a band but a country--its continued dependency on the automobile and the consequences to the natural world: "Then the economy collapsed and our theory was discarded in favor of an aesthetic of banal scarcity. Secular pragmatism replaced the faith-based work ethic which had once led to the lush arpeggios of grocery bags being loaded into single-driver vehicles and trunk lids thumping to a close in the late afternoon sunlight." The band grapples with their contemporary environment and amplifies the parking lot noise for their audiences, while a consciousness grows in them of what they are really hearing and in the reader of where Lu is taking us. The band's critical shift in the end takes place with the help of two momentous characters, a pirate radio station master and performance artist (each narrated by an"I" in a separate chapter that interrupts the main storyline), who reveal their own paths to transformation.

Ambient Parking Lot

Lu, Pamela

United States

Poetry. THE PINK offers a sequence of short poems with a detourned ear and an earnest intelligence. Condensing the remarkable craft of the long series Schlesinger chose as his debut volume, 2007's HELLO HELICOPTER, THE PINK reminds us that, as in language, "There are plenty of rivers in the sea / But you can't step on the same fish twice.""THE PINK: the color of course, or the recurrent carnations among the gathered leaves of this little bouquet, but also the sheer force of the form, the shear of a kind of textile cut, jagged and precise—a kind of coup de grace—not just between lines but also opening the serrated space between letters to reveal the 'hue' in 'house' or to separate the 'ink' from the 'inkling,' the 'blue' from the 'print.' To distinguish, in other words, the abstract plan from the material written form. In that linguistic pinking, Kyle Schlesinger cuts both into and against the weave, an angular slide into the inframince space of 'the leading of a phrase' (both the leading question of rhetoric and the spacing of letterforms), somewhere 'between the chair and the thought of it' (where chair is the French for 'body'), or 'the sensation of a concept' and 'the concept of a sensation.' Here is the world, of words, in miniature, through rose-colored magnifying glasses."—Craig Dworkin

The Pink

Schlesinger, Kyle

Poetry. Drama. Asian American Studies. African American Studies. Women's Studies. Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies. With new interest in poetry as a performative art, and with prewar experiments much in mind, the young poets of postwar America infused the stage with the rhythms and shocks of their poetry. From the multidisciplinary nexus of Black Mountain, to the Harvard-based Cambridge Poets Theater, to the West Coast Beats and San Francisco Renaissance, these energies manifested themselves all at once, and through the decades have continued to grow and mutate, innovating a form of writing that defies boundaries of genre. THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985 documents the emergence, growth, and varied fortunes of the form over decades of American literary history, with a focus on key regional movements. The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives. It will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant-garde theater.

The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985

Dramas & Plays

Poetry. In SOME MATH, the syncopations of poetry meet the (ir)regularity of mathematical equations. Consider the "story problems" of high school math class. When encountering the word "and," replace it with the addition symbol "+." When encountering the word "of," replace it with the multiplication symbol "x." Now reverse the process. The result is a series of sound poems that both employ and interrogate the global language of systems and networks. Astrophysics. Computer science. Short tetrameters. Long dactyls. 9/11. US military strategy. The energy pathways of acupuncture. The fish ladders of Gmail. The wires and electrodes of torture. The swirling products of global capital. Mathematician Benjamin Pierce called his field "the science that draws necessary conclusions." You do the math.

Some Math

Luoma, Bill

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. Art. Asian American Studies. Tan Lin's INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is an ambient novel composed of black and white photographs, postcards, Google reverse searches, letters, appendices, an index to an imaginary novel, reruns, and footnotes. The aunt in question can't sleep. She runs a motel in the Pacific Northwest. She likes watching Conan O'Brien late at night. She may be the narrator's aunt or she may be an emanation of a TV set. Structured like everybody's scrapbook, and blending fiction with nonfictional events, INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is about identities taken and given up, and about the passions of an immigrant life, rebroadcast as furniture. Ostensibly about a young man's disintegrating memory of his most fascinating relative, or potentially a conceptualist take on immigrant literature, it is probably just a treatment for a prime-time event that, because no one sleeps in motels, lasts into the late night and daytime slots.

Insomnia and the Aunt

Lin, Tan

Poetry. LEFT HAVING is the second full-length collection from poet Jesse Seldess. "One sees lines coming into being going out of existence. Taken that way, the words turning toward lines, seeing them become one another as they differ among themselves and dissipate into words and as spaces, this reader virtually floats and within this active resting state practices an incredible intimacy with the unknown in communication and in sharing an imminent sensate awareness with its language. Jesse Seldess's work performs this book, honoring and taking full advantage of its occasion to replace any knowing with the certainty of a relentlessly generous nature. I will never get to the bottom of it, and this work demonstrates what a pleasure and what an honest reckoning that can be"—Steve Benson.

Left Having

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