Poetry. THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS collects four long poems written in varying styles. The first poem in the book, "Relative Heat Index," is a serial poem in twenty-three parts that attempts to capture the personal and political climate of the United States plunged by its leaders into war following the September 11 attacks. Influenced by Robert Hayden's "Words in the Mourning Time" and George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous," which were similarly written during a decade of war and social upheaval, "Relative Heat Index" uses a fragmentary approach to speak the unspoken while also leaving spaces of silence to indicate the impossibility of fully capturing in a single poem the totality of war—domestic and abroad—and its devastations."A sequence of propulsive poems best read in one sitting, Alan Gilbert's THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS harnesses what it describes as poetry's broken voice and puts it in the service of social critique and cultural elegy. Signaling the failure of history to point a way toward a future and the perceived inevitability of corruption's lasting win, the poems make a stand for a kind of protest, lest we be left 'scrubbing capital's bathroom / with a toothbrush and one shredded square of paper towel.' These are poems for the end times that know no end. They won't cheer you up, but they will keep you company in your rage, and just possibly light a fire under you—all while making you, occasionally, laugh. It's what happens when a poem takes corporate absurdity to its logical conclusion: 'First the legroom / is removed, then the legs.' And when questions with knowable answers—'How much force can a building withstand?' are bound to those without—'What are the conditions of knowledge?' or 'Where is the love?' The love is in a certain fearlessness, put better by Gilbert himself: 'No one hedges / their bets when the only outcome is loss.'"—Anna Moschovakis

The Treatment of Monuments

Literature & Fiction

Gilbert, Alan

Poetry

SplitLevel Texts

Poetry. A CRUEL NIRVANA both is and is not a new Jerome Rothenberg collection. In other words, almost everything in this collection has been published before. Each of the three major sections (Narratives and Real Theater Pieces, The Notebooks, and Conversations) was originally published individually. A CRUEL NIRVANA brings together these long out-of-print smaller gatherings in a way that illuminates their important place in Rothenberg's crucial contribution to Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century poetics. Returning to these poems, properly contextualized, one finds them communicating in one field of immanence. If we feel exhausted by meaningless violence and marketing, A CRUEL NIRVANA shows us wellsprings of meaning and power we missed or just couldn't see in our exhaustion or disaffection.

A Cruel Nirvana

ROTHENBERG, Jerome

Poetry. "In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell of domestic partnerships with a shifting array of W and M. Women and Men? Names multiply, genders reverse, and those initials, flipped, transform into one another. I suspect M could refer to the Market, which hovers everywhere, funneling itself through characters and settling at any opportunity into Mine. At one point the narrator declares that an artwork 'supplements being while framing the subject as a caged thing.' Characters are magic, says one narrator, because they are 'mine,' and control feels good. These speculatively anecdotal meditations on identity, agency, and artifice are witty, cagy, and provocative—Harryman at her best."—Catherine Wagner"Part memoir, part autobiography, and part paean to the late Detroit playwright and poet Ron Allen, W—/M— pits Mnemosyne against Minerva, stringing and unstringing the clothesline of childhood, the lunch lines of adolescence, and the assembly lines of southeastern Michigan. Harryman traces and retraces the line per se as nomadic consciousnesses multiplying beyond the doubles that mark, and thus engender, the self-patrolled borders of identities. At each turn Harryman burrows into the interstices between, among, the grammars that partition normative life from its estranged twin(s). Think of W—/M— as an ode to a thinking that outflanks the actual—and so, makes the actual the center from which all thinking radiates."—Tyrone Williams"Carla Harryman's W—/M— is a sociosexual swirl which surprises and deepens at every turn. It is a diptych with the aura of personal history and portraiture, but its principal gift is its capacity to conjure a world—a kind of no-place that runs asymptotically to our own. Harryman marbles her language with noirish liasons, childhood landscapes, sublunar detritus, and unruly narrative gestures. This is a driven, shrewd book full of mystery, invention, play, and pleasure.—Maggie Nelson

W-/M-

Harryman, Carla

Poetry. "Poem. Novel. Essay. Here is a literary triptych whose panels swing from one another unfettered by geometry in wide and wild arcs. But there are hinges. Think of the upkeep of the minotaur at the center of what can only be the labyrinthine mind of Lucy Ives. This particular creature feeds on its own enclosure. Who said time is eternity turned into a moving image? How does this work on the page? As soon as Ives allows things focus, she pulls back, revealing a small component of a larger construct, but never anything objective and irreducibly whole. Thus, effectively her subject and obsession is not the demarcation of time, but the inability of time to be properly or comparatively enacted. What if Stein and Paul Éluard were a single poet? What if Wittgenstein, Elaine Scarry, and Charles and Ray Eames collaborated on a novelization of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits? What if Robbe-Grillet and Hélène Cixous were to re-write the Duino Elegies as an essay? Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out."—Noah Eli Gordon

The Worldkillers

Ives, Lucy

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. "In this long poem of poems, each poem page reads as if it could be the last. IF REALITY represents the end of the world (the end of politics the end of love the end of the poet) in its middle. It is the poem I have wanted to write, the poem that approaches an expression of the pain of the success of Nothing, the united statesian/global obliteration of the shared space of the tragic upon which it proliferates. It is the poem about end, without end."—Rachel Levitsky "Maged Zaher's IF REALITY DOESN'T WORK OUT is a text made of 'body and blood' in which our discerning and earnest global subject imbues versified sentential units with desire, loss, and a sweet buoyancy. This book is honest, strong, and bright as it navigates manifestation and dissipation, in love, in revolution, at once celebrating and mourning intimacy and its opposites."—Alli Warren

If Reality Doesn't Work Out

Zaher, Maged

Poetry. "Dear reader: practice opening this book, practice turning its pages, practice reading these words and returning to them, and practice these practices repeatedly. Laynie Browne has written a wondrous guide book that doesn't show us where we have not yet been, but more importantly, more beautifully, returns us to where we are—in this body that is mine, this body that breathes, this mind that thinks (or thinks it thinks). Make no mistake, these poems each are small forms of best advice, showing that truest courage requires endless opening to the moment one is in. Lucky for us, the days come as these poems do, one following another, each promising that we have yet another chance to practice what matters most, to arrive in that exalted attention in which the mind's devotion and the arm's embrace and the body's nerves and the lung's deep breath are one. Browne is a poet unrivalled in the generosities she offers her readers, and so we have now, again, a book that knows the gift is in the work, and the work takes practice."—Dan Beachy-Quick

P R A C T I C E

Browne, Laynie

Poetry. Quantum physics meets fable in this one-act tragicomedy by Elizabeth Zuba, her first full-length book of poetry. A balanced infusion of fairy-tale whimsy and the dense science of the very small, DECOHERENT delivers a haunting vision of madcap infinitudes. Translator of volumes by Marcel Broodthaers and editor of Ray Johnson's writing, Zuba's DECOHERENT is a happy companion to these artists' hyper-quotidian and fantastical worlds. "I have been awaiting this rare and decoherent book for a decade."—Jen Bervin

Decoherent the Wing'ed

Zuba, Elizabeth

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated by Pierre Joris. REVOLUTION GOES THROUGH WALLS was first published in Arabic by Sharkyat in 2014. Tarabuste Editions published a French edition, Révolution traverse des murs, translated into French by Hélène Nancy, Hedi Djebnoun, and Jean-Pierre Daumard, with a preface by Jean-Luc Nancy, in 2017. Portuguese and German editions are forthcoming. "It is a story of walls. They bar the way, resist, stand against. But they have fissures too. And one also can stick photos placards graphs poems screams on them."--Jean-Luc Nancy "Revolutions threaten poetry with loss of the intimate and the aesthetic. Safaa delves into this threat head-on in order to produce a book that is both beautiful and intimate, where the revolution becomes the daily gesture: 'when the tear gas entered my lungs, I decided to start smoking again.' This book doubles as an elegy for Safaa's brother Mohammad, lost to kidney illness and dialysis machines, and whom she glimpses reflected in the revolution martyrs he might have joined. But the poet declares that she doesn't know the road to 'paradise' and cannot guide Mohammad or the marchers. When the world gave up on the notion of revolution, the Tunisians and Egyptians filled the streets to revive it. REVOLUTION GOES THROUGH THE WALLS is political poetry at its best, intimate telling. Where a poet doesn't scream her revolt, she murmurs it."--Maged Zaher

Revolution goes through walls

Fathy, Safaa

History & Criticism

"Maged Zaher's lines flow like the rivers of Purgatory, out of a hell we hear about, and towards a Paradise he helps us intuit. Rippling in quick succession each poem holds to the turns and the eddies of feeling. He shares with us the flats of candor, the cascades of guilt, and the afternoon shimmer of utopian thought, not to mention medications and breakdowns, corporate culture, radical politics, spiritual craving, exile, the alienations of home, and cups of damn fine coffee. Despite all the love and suffering evoked here, the poet's charm never falters. (Is there any contemporary just so much fun to read)? Maged Zaher might just be Frank O'Hara's long lost Egyptian cousin. There is a life force, tested and true, passed on to us in the effortless dazzle of his lines."--Joseph Donahue Poetry.

The shadow that doesn't leave the shirt

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