Fiction. In the space of relation, Mary Burger offers a new kind of writing--a testimony that cannot be defended or deflected. SONNY, a series of speech acts, a hypnotic set of patterned particulars, constructs with the awareness that language "demands that we should see what's there and what is possible." Moving between the individual and the collective, attaching a kind of present-making to the space of dissolution found there, SONNY shows us a way to make new resemblances and new subjectivities out of what we've lost. This work of innovative prose forms and reforms itself into a history that remembers, that recalls and that echoes the desire of the narrator to "replace the story with itself."

Sonny

Literature & Fiction

Burger, Mary

Contemporary

Leon Works

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. By remixing stories from novels and films to zoom in on the black presences within them, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE ruminates on the sublime power of history to shape culture in the subconscious of both the artist and the reader/viewer. Moving from interrogations of François Ozon's 8 Femmes and Virginia Woolf's Orlando to the machinations of the Regency House Party reality TV show, UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE weaves threads of myth, fact and fiction into previously unexplored narratives lurking in our collective imagination. "This is truly a bold book, one that combines scenes of rich technicolor with the light of truth, at once invoking and dissolving cultural myths and faux histories."—Brenda Coultas "Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE takes up 'black presences in European literature, visual art, and film.' Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning."—San Francisco Bay Guardian

Unexplained Presence

Bryant, Tisa

United States

Poetry. Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS, Bhanu Kapil "explores/creates a shiftful place for she who is neither one thing nor another. Girl as hybrid of light and dark, of human and machine, of baby and mother, of all motherless, body-bound things. Laloo is a traveler, hitchhiking through landscapes American and otherwise. A frightening, transforming, longing book."—Rebecca Brown This work "celebrates the cobbling together of lives-tracing the simplest desires to connect bodies, words, cultures, just as they threaten to become prosthetic, amputations. With a global body and sharp mind, Bhanu Kapil maps the poetic, exhilarating journey between pain and insight. A true landmark."—Thalia Field

Incubation: A Space for Monsters

Kapil, Bhanu

Poetry

Poetry. Melissa Buzzeo's WHAT BEGAN US is a story of portraiture, a philosophy of the book, and the retrieval of a fifteen-year-old girl from the ruins of an unnamed (unnameable) event. This unsettling work builds out of the debris of fractionated memory and broken gestures toward an illuminated structure, a thought project well worth the time it will take to know it. "WHAT BEGAN US is an agitated, activated lyric that incants to a changing, pulsating beloved. What or who this beloved is goes beautifully unnamed. This is a new take on that very old form of the lyric. In its newness it is something shimmering and fully complicated."-Juliana Spahr

What Began Us

Buzzeo, Melissa

Poetry. African American Studies. "HUGHSON'S TAVERN is a sly, rowdy, big-eared book, lining out and sounding out, filled with desperado aplomb. Big-footed as well (reminding one of Olson's reminder that a foot is to kick with), it plies a 'boot-heel music' given to offhand acuity, tonic reprisal, declarative elan: Butch Morris meets Howlin' Wolf. As elsewhere in Moten's work, in HUGHSON'S TAVERN the wounded rally"--Nathaniel Mackey. Moten is the author of ARKANSAS, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and I Ran from It but Was Still in It. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Hughson's Tavern

Moten, Fred

Poetry. Translated from the Dutch by Francis R. Jones. "Hans Faverey's poems double as echolocations and tactile thought machines. They twist from speculative meditation into sensorial awe with Ponge-like focus and a penchant for grandeur akin to Barbara Guest. But Faverey's curious lyrics are obsessed with the temporal, the fleeting, and the long-gone: developing a poetic landscape of arrested particulars, conversations with the dead, and memories plucked from Homeric visitants. And sometimes the lines just dumbfound me in their ghostlier demarcations: 'First the message kills / the receiver, then / it kills the sender. / Whatever / the language.'"&mdash;Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Chrysanthemums, Rowers

Faverey, Hans

History & Criticism

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