Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. Essay. Hybrid Genre. 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Finalist. JP Howard's debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940's and 1950's) with snapshots from the poet's own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother's modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image—a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a "model" mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother's overlapping lives—unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970's and 80's: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter's eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein. "JP Howard's collection of poems is a raw reminder of the experience of motherhood and daughterhood. Her sharp memories of love and neglect; elegance, admiration and inadequacy leave a salty/sweet taste not soon forgotten."—Jewelle Gomez "Juliet P. Howard's porcelain collection of daughter memoirs is enough to break into you like fine China—the shadow of her legacy hovering just above diva, the tenderness of grief stained just below doll."—Anastacia Tolbert "Praise Juliet Howard for the wonderful ability to bring to life a mother whose beauty, seduction and danger challenge the notions of a young girl growing up in her shadow. SAY/MIRROR manages to capture—with sharp detail and lively resonant language—the elegance and ambivalence of the poet's mother and her world. These poems evoke images of passion and loss, pain and joy. We must all stand up and applaud the poem 'pushing her way to the surface... her shape on the page as she unfolds.'"—Pamela L. Laskin "JP Howard stands out both for her fine poetry and for her passionate, unrelenting involvement with and on behalf of lesbians of color, all lesbians, and the LGBTQ literary community. She reverently celebrates our forebears. A poet, a teacher, and a curator, Ms. Howard has shown an ongoing commitment to nurturing our writers and to writing and publishing from her heart."—Lambda Literary Award judges Reginald Harris and Lee Lynch

Say/Mirror

Literature & Fiction

Howard, JP

Poetry

The Operating System

Poetry. Music. Hybrid Genre. EVERYBODY'S AUTOMAT, Mark Gurarie's debut, invites the reader to hear the discordant, decadent music of the collapsed marketplace of language, assembling from its wreckage a sense of identity as collage-like imprint, as misplaced nostalgia and porous memory. Here, colonized by empire, the naïve optimism of the 20th century collapses into its dystopian, contemporary reality; the city is revealed to be its own kind of forest; broadcasts and commercial lingo echo back, distorted and weaponized, and sounds—the rumblings of chaos and chance as much as the mathematical order of a melancholy tune—coalesce into gritty song. What arises is an artifact assembled of disparate but connected idioms, each strategy carving a discrete, cubby-like space within an interconnected whole. Along the way, the ghosts of Erik Satie, John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, Elvis and the Cold War mingle with the Slits, Martha Stewart, Captain Kirk, Snookie and an out-of-date poster of the solar system. In turns, EVERYBODY'S AUTOMAT is an exploration of the possibilities of avant garde musical approaches and a meditation on the precarious and paradoxical nature of urban living and its jangly rhythms. Elsewhere, the fractured lexicon of an invading extra-terrestrial is dressed in the aggressive language of antiquated telecasts and advertising broadcasts, and the pop song becomes poetic form, gesturing towards alienation and finding, in real time, its own sort of redemption out of the ashes. "The pitched quality of inventiveness in Mark Gurarie's poems... is a worthy homage to the aleatoric musician John Cage and other musicians who inspire both the silences and contemplative notes of whimsy. The poems, like the music, however, are hitched to emotional states of being that are never distended or anemic, but curiously imaginative and responsibly resourceful to the core."—Major Jackson "Mark Gurarie's EVERYBODY'S AUTOMAT could be the offspring of John Ashbery and Ziggy Stardust. And yet these are poems only Gurarie can write. These poems inhabit a superhuman linguistic and psychosocial consciousness. Martians are muses, as are John Cage &amp; planet earth, who all play supporting roles in this delightful and haunting debut collection."—Ali Power "EVERYBODY'S AUTOMAT arrives like a hundred aliens wielding a thousand devices to process the glittering wreckage of the Anthropocene. The book's as much of a party as it is a postmortem revealing how we spoke to each other, where we failed each other, and that we never stopped making music, even as everything went irreversibly wrong. Whether Mark Gurarie is one of us, one of them, or a little of both, I can imagine no fitter or better poet to 'confront the alien that speaks of ourselves.'"—Mark Bibbins

Everybody's Automat

Gurarie, Mark

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Environmental Studies. Hybrid Genre. Everyone knows that Western civilization (and probably Eastern civilization, also) will collapse within the next seven years. The question is: how will you survive? The answer is simple. Follow the advice below, explicitly. If you do so, you will weather the coming storms. I hope to run into you, and your newfound tribe, in a lily-rich meadow after the Apocalypse. Sparrow has reinvented the post- apocalyptic manual. Instead of advising his readers to stockpile food and kill intruders, he emphasizes giving your TV set a Tarot reading and finding rhyming names in the phone book. (There are many other suggestions: 268 in all.) Sparrow guarantees that following his sometimes-eccentric methods will enable you to survive the apocalypse, with your tribe of improvisational nomads. (The optimum number of tribal members is 14, he explains.) "The names that come to mind are S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, James Thurber—and not just because they're dead. Or Woody Allen—if he'd never made any films, just the little prose pieces. Everyone thinks of Sparrow (the poet and pop star) as a Communist Republican Jewish Tantrik Yogi Hippie—more a symptom of post-modernism than a practitioner. Yet [Sparrow] reveals himself rooted in tradition: New Yorker as sly wiseguy, a line going all the way back to our ur-ironist, Father Knickerbocker."—Hakim Bey "Sparrow's harvest of advice, wisdom, fake wisdom, and miniature poems is eccentric and funny, yes, but also thoughtful, politically engaged, and generous: Sparrow sees our familiar world from another angle, he pays attention to its peculiar beauties, and he wakes us up. HOW TO SURVIVE is a pleasure to read, read aloud to a friend, and think about later."—Lydia Davis "I love how Sparrow occupies time—specifically my time. His genius is his pleasure and that pleasure is a roar and a sigh and a long walk against capitalism. I could read his thoughts until I die. I'm sure I will."—Leopoldine Core "God knows we need this guide which is why He sent Sparrow to dwell among us. Is it Zen? Is it 'deterritorialization'? Has the world's navel ever been rubbed like this? If wit can save the world from itself, this collection of tricks, poems, and fake wisdom will surely achieve that. Even if wit cannot save the world at least you will die laughing as the gentle anarchist allows you to see what you always knew but didn't know you knew."—Mick Taussig

How to Survive the Coming Collapse of Civilization (and Other Helpful Hints)

(American poet) Sparrow

Performance Studies. Dance. Art. Music. Hybrid Genre. Collaborations. With Rebecca Lazier (Choreographer), Dan Trueman (Composer), Maria Baranova (Photography), and Lynne DeSilva-Johnson (Editor, Concept, Commentary, Design).  This document is a collection of propositions. It contains the dance and music score, performer instructions, guiding principles, and notes on the collaborations that led to the creation of the performance of There Might Be Others. In publishing this document the work becomes an open source for any reiterations, reimaginings, and repurposings. It is a field guide to a process of collective composition, an archive of a project, and presents the score as a set of possibilities to be taken in parts or absorbed as a whole. While a held paper is a fixed item, the score is a moment on a continuum. TMBO marks choreographer Rebecca Lazier's New York Live Arts debut with this commissioned movement-based realization of Terry Riley's seminal masterpiece IN C, performed with a live score by Dan Trueman in collaboration with members of two of today's most vital ensembles, SŌ Percussion and Mobius Percussion. Created along with a diverse group of artists, designers and scientists, and featuring an international cadre of performers, the work questions the role of presence, performer agency and collective decision-making to create emergent forms.  "Seminal works of the avant-garde become so when the inherent risk at the heart of the experiment catalyzing the vision to its fruition pushes the work's sphere of influence beyond its original form and often its intended meaning. Intrepid choreographer Rebecca Lazier's penchant for musical interpretation and the infinite aesthetic and physical languages in its breadth makes her among the very best of her generation—and as this book attests, she possesses a vision that will bear influence on generations to come. What a gift to this and future generations that the unique scope of this remarkable project will have its record in the pages of this tract, and a gift to us to be a part of bringing 'There Might Be Others' to life."—Tommy Kriegsmann, Director of Programs, New York Live Arts

There Might Be Others

Arts & Photography

Lazier, Rebecca

Trueman, Dan

Other Media

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Art. Translated from the Arabic by Mona Kareem, with Mona Zaki, and Jonathan Wright; and with Ammiel Alcalay, Pierre Joris and Lynne DeSilva-Johnson assisting/editing. Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award for poetry. The Operating System is honored to publish the first Arabic-English full translation of Ashraf Fayadh's singular volume of poetry, INSTRUCTIONS WITHIN, which was published by the Beirut- based Dar al-Farabi in 2008 and later banned from distribution in Saudi Arabia. This special edition includes two paintings by Ashraf Fayadh on its front and back covers, and is right bound, asking the reader to consider their estrangement from Arabic language, literature, and life, inviting a new relationship to begin to form. The Operating System will donate proceeds from sales of this book to support Fayadh's ongoing case for his release from imprisonment for apostasy as a response to these very verses in Saudi Arabia. "Why do you need to read this book in America today? Because a US journalist asked if it really was worth it to write poems that might get you killed. Because Ashraf Fayadh, as poet, artist and human being, is being jailed and tortured for doing his job, that is for daring to expose &amp; deride the two-headed Moloch governing the country he lives in (Saudi Arabia) and ours (these States): Fundamentalist religion &amp; oil-money. Because Ashraf Fayadh is inventing a needed poetics to break not only those taboos but also the shackles of standard Arab poetics, freeing the language—&amp; a freed language is needed for free thinking. Because his own exile (he is of Palestinian extraction) is so absolute that it does not fit the traditional nostalgic poetics of exile &amp; searches for a new way of saying a new &amp; wilder dislocation. Because this exile is so close to all of our own dislocations, even as, smugly ensconced in our North American bunker, we don't see that the same future is awaiting us. Because he wrote: 'I am Hell's experiment on planet Earth.'"—Pierre Joris "Palestinian poet, artist and cultural activist Ashraf Fayadh reminds us, through his life and work, that blasphemy (for which he has been sentenced to 8 years in prison and 800 lashes) is still a crime in Saudi Arabia, but also that poetry is powerful against the criminal madness of a deranged state: '...these pages have exhausted all languages known to earth / ...to offer a name that matches your definition of self / your name-like an inkwell pregnant with possibilities.' The Operating System does us an extraordinary service by making this magnificent poet's voice available. Read Fayadh to understand what we are fighting against, and for!"—Margaret Randall "Just a few years before his death, the great poet Amiri Baraka railed against what he saw as a poetry of complacency, of 'the indoors,' and harkened back to those of his generation (and older), 'who actually worked to register some understanding of 'the great outdoors' i.e., the real world.' It is with more than some irony that we here, in the belly of the imperial beast, must seek such poetry of 'the great outdoors' from someone like Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Like the real world, Fayadh's poems are dizzying in their associations and resonance, recalling echoes of lines from different times, languages, and circumstances, from revery to exile, from brutality to utmost tenderness. Poet and artist Etel Adnan once wrote that 'Palestine is a land planted / by eyes refusing to be closed.' The poetry of Ashraf Fayadh, in a dream state of vigilance, attention, and horror, forces us to look at the world we actually inhabit, in all its glory and horror."—Ammiel Alcalay

Instructions Within

Fayadh, Ashraf

Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. Contrary to the book's title, LET IT DIE HUNGRY is a collection of poems bursting with life. Recklessly sensual, provocative and profoundly curious, Meissner's coming-of-age poems seek to anchor their place in a messy world, blurring the edges of hard borders and disparate identities. Finding joy, connection and determination in desperate spaces, as well as the slippery terrain of a changing self, Meissner's voice is at once a reckoning, a proclamation, and an open question. Sprinkled with the author's illustrations, the book's multidisciplinary approach also includes lesson plans, originally utilized in a women's prison, that invite the reader to write their own way out of polarizing dichotomies—and into the vast grey space of what it means to be alive. "Caits Meissner's LET IT DIE HUNGRY is a stunningly potent archive of surviving. In poems, drawings, notes, and workbook-style experiments, Meissner generously shares her tools of becoming while simultaneously reinventing what a book of poems might be. In each of these modes it is clear: Meissner believes in the powers of seeing, testifying, and saying what is most difficult. Running through the blood of this book I hear Audre Lorde's charge in The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action: 'Your silence will not protect you.' From lyric narratives to achingly lucid prose, this book is ardor-medicine against oblivion. These poems '[spill] past the heart's armor.'"—Aracelis Girmay "Caits Meissner's LET IT DIE HUNGRY deals with the difficulty of the body, the 'human robe' (as she aptly calls it) that hinders and endangers the soul beneath. It's an intense book—at time violent and vulnerable—a dangerous but brave place for readers, filled with dreams, fantasy, nightmare, all mixed-in with stark reality. These poems are human and wise, and in the writing prompts, the reader is helped along in the struggle to better understand herself. This is a wildly exciting debut book."—Bianca Stone "In this collection dedicated to the women poets of Afghanistan that concludes with a poem for the women poets at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Caits Meissner writes with great urgency of lives and landscapes scarred by conflict and pain. But even as her rangy, associative poems take us into terrain of turmoil, her compassion for her subjects offers the possibility of reconciliation through the very recognition that poems provide."—David Groff

Let It Die Hungry

Meissner, Caits

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. "In the tragi-comic—and worse—chaos of our times—suppose our writing began to appear as letters caught in barcodes. Phrases and bits of words breaking off en route to scanners designed for registering information but not the disturbance of meaning. It is, literally, with this provocative vision that Judith Goldman's AGON begins. Fragments—words with ing or ite or ppeals detached—mark the violence and folly of our weaponized and otherwise benighted cultures. At times, a necessary lyricism wells up without betraying the truth of 'Cumulative transfers By the 'agreed upon' price / the Temp,est has of late stripped the pe,tals away.' There's even more to this many-genred book—one to be lived with, in the urgency of its poetry, its philosophical and socio-political inquiry—font of brilliance that sustains vitally agonistic conversation across perilous divides."—Joan Retallack "The Commodification of Everything. That was the pivot point of materialist discourse not even five years ago. But now, it's time to crack open the piths of the most fundamental doings of our species. After the sweeping tide of ethnonational victories currently sweeping the globe, The Weaponization of Everything, is not merely the 'speak' of The Now, but the do of all its subjects, whether collusive or rebellious. Judith Goldman's AGON is borne amidst this new reality. Few works of experimental literature aim so high as to flush out the full range affectual coordinates as to reveal their age's Agon as a controlling demigod of our own making, that is, to raise up the Agon's 'agon'."—Rodrigo Toscano "Judith Goldman's AGON confronts the ubiquitous naturalization inherent in the weaponization of race, gender, global warming, poetics, language, utterance, politics, torture, immigration, and whatever else is changeable under the guise of aggression masquerading as mental freedom. '...the intensification of weapons already in place,' and '...observed nearly everywhere,' AGON deftly solders ideas of defensive assimilation (weapons already in place) to our conscious and unconscious activities of daily living. One can only bow down in shock and awe to AGON's scorched earth dissemination of open-ended spaces to think, while thinking is still, hopefully, under what we presume is our jurisdiction."—Kim Rosenfield A cross-genre work that intercuts and assembles three textual threads, AGON inventories ubiquitous contemporary exempla of weaponization: in the culture propagated by neoliberalism, all social forms—ordinary, necessary relations, transactions, and communications—have been turned into fodder for social aggression. AGON audits the disavowed violence of abstractive technologies in their material effects, while also tracing the subtle anatomy of violence in its more "proper" spheres. Is poetry one of these? Writing alongside Amiri Baraka's invective "Black Art," AGON builds a dossier on the aggressivity peculiar to literary speech, thinking this issue in relation to the volatile politics around poetry in America at this moment.

agon

Goldman, Judith

Literary Nonfiction. Music. Performance Studies. History and Politics. Hybrid Genre. Edited by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson. S&#333; Percussion (Where (we) Live, Next Wave 2012) gives the Second Amendment a soundtrack in this affecting foray into America's fraught relationship with guns. Taking mallets to disassembled sniper rifles and assorted drums, the musicians serve as Greek chorus, commenting instrumentally on sung and spoken texts drawn from the nightmares and nostalgia of armed experiences. Three-time Obie-winning director Ain Gordon and choreographer and performer Emily Johnson give depth to this probing work in which anger meets inalienable rights, dark memories resurface, and a contested weapon sings a bittersweet song. A GUN SHOW was facilitated by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson in collaboration with Adam Sliwinski with imput from S&#333; Percussion for release in tandem with the NY Premiere of A GUN SHOW at BAM, Nov 30-Dec 3, 2016.

A GUN SHOW

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Sliwinski, Adam

Antiques & Collectibles

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Disability Studies. Movement Studies. Dance. '"[I]n the slow gestures / of a person adjusting / to too much light' and with the faith of a chemist, Stephanie Heit sets fire inside her own dark and offers 'light someone not yet arrived/will understand.' THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a breathtaking (which is to say, life-giving) book that both stills and energizes by breaking and reforming the unseen bonds of DNA, language, geography, and history."—TC Tolbert "Stephanie Heit's THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a sonorous force field calling on tenderness, care, vigilance and abandon. An all-encompassing clarity saturates mind, spirit, movement and emotion. To locate the blind spot and unburden experience of the horizon's relentless pressure—this is what the text does tenfold, imparting and dispelling the inexplicable along peripheries and in intimately centered frames of movement: gorgeously evocative and intensely realized capacious psychic flows."—Brenda Iijima "Stephanie Heit has choreographed, in her first full-length poetry collection, a deeply engaging articulation of the interplay between mental illness and the creative instinct, history and destiny, and limitation and willful boundary. Here, we have an author brave enough to say 'I suffer' and talented enough to excavate the lyrical beauty of that suffering. THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY offers the reader a textured view of a graceful body torn between trying to remember and trying to forget."—Airea D. Matthews "In these fierce, moving poems, we witness a self as it seeks its right path through those landscapes we call world. We are taken along, wandering through urban streets or across beaches that once were lakes, sometimes dreamily, sometimes searingly awake, digging through stories and years. These poems enact one of our most potent human gifts: our ability to find ourselves tumbling, falling down, standing up—in proprioceptive relation to everything in our earthly realm."—Eleni Sikelianos THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind, these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and by experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations. Cover Photo: "Crossing Visible," by Gwynneth VanLaven

The Color She Gave Gravity

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Heit, Stephanie

Mental Health

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Film. Music. Graphic Novel. Criticism &amp; Literary Theory. American History. Hybrid Genre. "Johnny Damm's SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR diagrams the ways we move toward and away from one another, exploring relationship through the failures and disjuncts that reveal it. In annotated illustrations taken out of their original context, in comics stripped of their narrative content, and in cinematic essays whose parts are sutured where they've been spliced, these pieces take apart the familiar to see what makes it tick. Troubling our assumptions about the workings of nonfiction, they reveal themselves as highly constructed, interweaving the personal and historical just as the book's "rat-a-tat" refrain rings out both drumbeat and gunfire. If we catch ourselves dancing, we've missed the point. Witty and serious, critical and compassionate, Damm invents a new visual poetics in which what we see and hear do not sync up. This is his way of waking us up with a "BLAM!" and "WHOOSH!" to the history of appropriation and conquest underlying America's popular forms. Nothing here is familiar, even as we recognize parts of the whole."—Amaranth Borsuk "Johnny Damm's SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR mashes up Classics Illustrated, vintage diagrams, and film director bios to create an unlikely fusion that is a oblique yet often poignant autobiography as well as an essay on the way that we transform culture as much as it transforms us."—Matt Madden "SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR captures 'freeze-frames' from the history of comic books, crime films, and blues music, all from the middle of the darkest century. Johnny Damm accents the pulpish poetics in both the visual poetry and the phonic milieu, experienced by the masses in each cheap genre made on the fly for everyone. "—Christian Bök Herman Melville performing jumping jacks. An experimental Brazilian filmmaker making British propaganda films. A legendary delta bluesman who prefers to play the pop hits of the day. In SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR, Johnny Damm sifts through cultural detritus to disturb the sleeping past. In an uncategorizable mix of image and text, SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR scavenges from 50's pulp comics, 19th century scientific diagrams, film noir shooting scripts, and more. Damm introduces the reader to an American landscape of bastard blendings, where the familiar swiftly gives way to the uncanny.

The Science of Things Familiar

Comics & Graphic Novels

Damm, Johnny

Graphic Novels

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

Books by The Operating System