Internationally acclaimed Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun wrote Blackboards in 1997, and two years later celebrated Slovenian artist Metka Krasovec painted "Trak," a captivating series of images spanning one long scroll of paper. Joined together, as poet John Yau writes in his introduction, "Salamun's melancholia and Krasovec's sense of longing set in motion... a dance of words and images, of words that evoke images we cannot picture, and images that define a world that cannot be contained in words."

Blackboards (Artist/Poet Collaboration)

Arts & Photography

Šalamun, Tomaž

Painting

Saturnalia Books

Funny and frightening, moving and unsettling, the prose poems in Mark’s debut collection take readers on a wild ride The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark, is the premier winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Miller (Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poetry). Of The Babies, poet Claudia Rankine writes, “Rarely do we encounter poems that are so precisely framed, though on their surface seemingly whimsical and erratic. These poems are gorgeous, intelligent, and disturbing.”

The Babies

Literature & Fiction

Orah Mark, Sabrina

Poetry

Yau's comic and cutting poetry collides with the work of Nozkowski, whom the New Yorker has termed "the Chardin of contemporary abstraction." The end result is a dazzling and vibrant concoction of visual and written imagery. All the poems in Ing Grish are new, as are Nozkowski's paintings and illustrations, which he created expressly for this collection. Ing Grish was named "Book of the Year" by Small Press Traffic in San Francisco.

Ing Grish (Poet/Artist Collaboration)

YAU, John

"Correspondence," writes Mark Doty, "is a fresh accomplishment, swift with feeling and intelligence, the work of a restless critical mind mapping its way toward a way to bear the weight of love." Kathleen Graber's debut book takes us on a trip through history and time, varying her subjects with speed and seamlessness, to a dizzying, dazzling effect. From the Philadelphia Eagles to Cornell's boxes, from a fertility clinic to Daguerre's prints, from Kafka to running over two cats, from Annette Benning to Marianne Moore, Kathleen Graber's poems embrace what her inquisitive mind traverses, ensnaring past and present, familiar and foreign, soulful and scientific, in a celebration of chaos that is generous and healing."

Correspondence

Graber, Kathleen

Mark Doty introduces this stunning new collection, the third in Saturnalia Books new Artist/Poet Collaboration series. Bill Knott has to be the only poet who can claim to have been for nearly forty years now at the head of both the avant-garde and the rear-garde of American poetry. Meticulous and formal, yet wildly inventive, Knott is among the very finest poets living today. Paired perfectly with his poems is the surreal and oddly beautiful world of Star Black s collages. Stigmata Errata Etcetera is a book that brings absurdity and wit into clear focus, reverberating with Knott s unique blend of heartrending humor and Black s playful and passionate imagery. As Doty writes, These two not-so-different sorts of creation together point back to the mystery of origins: the new arises, out of its polyglot beginnings, one unlikely thing rubbing up against another. Found things, assembled with the strange freshness of the ordering eye or ear, bring new and distinct presences into the world.

Stigmata Errata Etcetera (Artist/Poet Collaboration)

Knott, Bill

Poet Jane Miller collaborates with artist Beverly Pepper on a highly personal journey through the debris of the poet’s crumbling relationship, and her mother’s descent into illness. Beautifully rendered poems and short chapters of poetic prose combine with Pepper’s chalk and oil drawings to form an intimate and unique meditation on the nature of love, of heartache, of the many midnights we, each and every one of us, live through and carry with us through our lives. “The goal is not to make sense of, but art of this story,” writes poet C.D. Wright in her introduction. “The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess. There are mental sufferings and physical sufferings to go through; to apprehend if one can. There are the spent casings of history to sift through, pick up and examine. Calm-like, hysterical, forensic. This life not just a worn passage.” In the end, the light shines through Miller’s midnights and the rewards of passing through the darkness with her are countless.

Midnights (Artist/Poet Collaboration Series)

Miller, Jane

Winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Selected by John Yau Catherine Pierce’s debut, Famous Last Words, is a love letter to life, poetry, and all things American. Beginning with a series of literal love poems (to the word “lonesome”, to blank space, to doo-wop, to fear, etc.), Pierce whisks the reader on a cross-country road trip (both literally and figuratively) that takes a tangential spree into a series of genre films and ends with gallows humor in the re-imagining of the events surrounding the famous last words of icons like Billy the Kid, Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, and Pancho Villa. From start to finish, Pierce’s book is a delight to the senses, a playful, nostalgic dance that ends with the reader wanting more.

Famous Last Words

Pierce, Catherine

Letters to Poets honors and commemorates the hundredth anniversary of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by partnering a selection of 14 of the country’s leading contemporary poets with 14 emerging poets and documenting their correspondences. These poets challenge the hierarchies and pitfalls endemic to the mentoring process, and ask some of the day’s toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class, and gender. Spanning a range of not only generations but cultural, aesthetic, and economic backgrounds, these diverse pairings both challenge and support each other artistically and politically. The result is in turns dramatic, enlightening, and entertaining.

Letters to Poets

Firestone and Teen Lomax, Jennifer and Dana

Essays & Correspondence

In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient's third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient's signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn't let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.

Days of Unwilling

Bedient, Cal

Winner of the 2008 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Doty To the Bone, winner of the 2008 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Doty, is a poetic feast. These lush, highly detailed, and at times vulgar poems give insight into the body, mind, and soul of the millions of kitchen workers across the globe. Told with gritty authenticity that only someone with true life experience working “the back of the house”, to use culinary lingo, can bring, Agudelo leads us by the mouth and nose on a one of a kind experience. In Whitmanesque style, Agudelo gives voice to the myriad of colorful characters who prepare our foods and clean up after us, lifting the veil on what we’d rather not see, but can’t turn away from. To the Bone is a unique collection by a stunning new talent. As Mark Doty writes, “To the Bone is an unexpected, bracing debut. You’ll have trouble putting it down.”

To the Bone

Agudelo, Sebastian

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