A collection of socialist, surrealist poetry and prose, Theater of War parodies the rhetoric of the U.S. National Security Strategy Report, exposing the fascist machinations of the Bush administration. Presented with unforgiving humor, disjunctive syntax, and subversive wordplay, Theater of War removes the earplugs that "defend" us from dissent.

Theater of War: The Plot Against the American Mind

Literature & Fiction

Powers, Nicholas

Genre Fiction

UpSet Press

UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad's first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author's preface, and new poems, under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher's note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.

Born Palestinian, Born Black: & The Gaza Suite

Hammad, Suheir

Poetry

In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Cihan Kaan projects an avant-garde, post 9/11 world, from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. It's a place where Coney Island meets Mars; where hijabi girls are punk rock dervishes; where identity salesmen count pigeons at insane asylums as a cream cheese conspiracy brews in gitmo; where rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day; where the transgendered are holy; and where the bacon is halal. Kaan offers up five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn.

Halal Pork and Other Stories

Kaan, Cihan

Contemporary

"In the poems of Jennifer Husk the world is a membrane words bounce against and poke into, skating on the scrim then delving below in quick sharp digs of fragment, image, and gut-punch. This work is 'river dialogue' and 'glare on the surface' all at once, achieving experiment, a sustained rhetoric, intimacy and political weight in one go. If Van Gogh graffitied 'The Starry Night' on an urban wall then broke it apart with a mallet, you might get at something resembling the rough and precious texture of a Husk poem. Her register is horizon-wide & she jumps its length in a blink: the same stanza holds 'rooms of dust' and 'harmony,' then enjoins us to 'hack the map' and 'tag it city-wide.' This is a skateboard train anyone wishing to journey the sidewalk, desert, star, and cerebellum should hop on, presto." --Ana Božičević "Stars of the Night Commute" (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010)

Vocalises

Husk, Jenny

The long awaited 2nd edition of from the warring factions brings back into print Ammiel Alcalay's book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, site of the massacre of some 7,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995. This daring blend of lyric and document remaps the world we inherit, from native New England to the Roman Empire, from the Gulf War to Palestine and the Balkans. The late Adrienne Rich has called from the warring factions the "kind of poem I've been waiting to read." And in her new introduction, Diane di Prima writes "This book forced me to redefine my life." Accompanied by an extensive discussion between Alcalay and poet Benjamin Hollander, as well as a new preface by the author, this edition brings an essential text of the post-9/11 world back into the conversation.

from the warring factions

Alcalay, Ammiel

Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar, Ammiel Alcalay is Deputy Chair of the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and former chair of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College. He is the founder and general editor, under the auspices of the PhD program in English and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and has edited texts by Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, and Joanne Kyger for the series.

A little history

Essays & Correspondence

"Throughout her writing career, Tueni remained fiercely independent and unattached to fashionable schools of thought. Her fondness for her native land is intertwined with her need to reflect upon the realities and conditions that surrounded her. The operations at work in her poetry--from the varied linguistic play to the jarring juxtapositions, from the ambiguity of certain passages to the playful manipulations of syntax--are intensely original and delightfully strange. Scenes from her own childhood accompany imagery drawn from Christian mythology and rituals, while tales of lovers scorned are juxtaposed with those of gods abandoned. Revelatory descriptions of springs, mountains and street-scenes accompany metaphysical contemplations, themselves masked by layers of striking imagery. Forceful and meditative, two books that present internal and emotional landscapes as well as a sensual if fragmented portrait of her urban and natural surroundings." --Amir Parsa

The Blond Texts and The Age of Embers

Tuéni, Nadia

In 2002-just after 9/11 and prior to the US invasion of Iraq-a group inspired by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury's seminar on Arab prison literature decided to collectively translate Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar's collection A Dove in Free Flight. Smuggled out of prison, the poems were published in Beirut without his knowledge, as a means of publicizing the poet's plight as a political prisoner, and exerting pressure on public opinion to pay attention to his case. A French version, translated by the great Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laabi, himself a former political prisoner, followed. More than fourteen years after initial completion of the project, UpSet Press presents this extraordinary poetic, human, and historical document, featuring an introduction by editors Ammiel Alcalay and Shareah Taleghani, a preface by Elias Khoury, and a lengthy interview with the poet himself following his release on November 16, 2000, after thirteen years, seven months, and seventeen days in the Syrian carceral archipelago.

A Dove in Free Flight

Bayrakdar, Faraj

<div> "City of Pearls is one continuous gift-giver. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem lusciously, unselfishly and most certainly, unapologetically shares with us the magic and glory of story. Stories made from lived lives...full with words and images that speak of...place, purpose, father, family, fragility, strength, beauty, suffering, celebration. Stories to hold us tight...and inspire us to continue dreaming through it all." --Ursula Rucker, author of Supa Sista "I was brought back to the landscapes of my childhood by these sensitive poems. So quietly but firmly do they evoke not only the shattered rocks of Hyderabad but also the ways in which some of us live perpetually between, belong neither to one place nor the other, always in transit, always hoping for news from 'home.'" --Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition "This book is a hamlet, a jewel box, a compass. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem strings the tender odds and ends of memory into a dazzling odyssey across the continents of daughterhood and motherhood. We are born from places as much as people, these poems remind us. City of Pearls soars with the dignity mined from a life lit with leavings." --Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro "There is nothing more important to love than memory, and Sham-e-Ali's stunning debut collection is full of love. Awash in the fragrance of mourning and yearning, these poems stretch out, split into tributaries, condense into coral clouds - above all, they nourish. Both affectionate and merciless, this book is a "place where it all worked out." It is a gift to breathe with it."--Bao Phi, author of Thousand Star Hotel </div>

City of Pearls

Nayeem, Sham-e-Ali

<div>"April Naoko Heck's collection gives striking image and voice to the questions of a daughter, and the answers tell the story of a mother, the story of a hundred, no, a thousand mothers and daughters. These poems are flickering shrines built from the debris of history and memory, both Japanese and American. Heck is strong enough to revisit, to cradle even, the bombs of our history, as well as the many smaller detonations that ripple through our lives with specific destructions--family, death, alcoholism, identity, or as she calls it: my mummy, my memory." --Natalie Diaz</div>

A Nuclear Family

Heck, April Naoko

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Books by UpSet Press