The Room, Vi Khi Nao, shows us in this brief and entrancing collection, is a little lyric engine of observation, feeling, philosophy, and social criticism. Listen, the room is urging us: Pay attention. — John Keene

In GRAPES Benjamin Krusling examines a range of impressions I know well of modern life: the public sphere of private realities/desires intertwined with the deceptions of national performance. Blackness duplicates it twofold: “What is my mind’s Floral/ percentage? When Ecstasy is available/ Love bursts /Law blooms” showing us that the conveyor belt garden of earthly delights continues to arrive at a staggering global cost. —Nikki Wallschlaeger

Ben's poems have magic and carry inside them an absolute or total will to precision and also an exhibition of shyness, which is looking away. They tremble, therefore, with an exactness that is so moving, so exciting ---  "people have energy     they shock and hold you," as do the poems in this wonderful collection. My goodness, I think they are all about the process of allowing tenderness to rule our actions in all this violence. I am completely converted to Ben's voice.   —Simone White

Keith Jones knows that to honor your ancestors you must also break their thrall, must learn “to be outside / in the presence of, / to be inside within” all at once, and so in these poems of stunning patience, Oppen and the Objectivists haunt the “absence, / broken forms, lavish rift” of his vision. Far from the isolate, mineral clarity of the shipwreck of the singular, these poems find in the other’s “gaze a maze,” one not to solve but to be riddled by oneself, and being so confused admit too to be being confounded—that is, not alone, but the very site of those radical interpenetrations where “you” and “I” and all the pronouns lose the ease of their distinction. Each line of these poems feels to me a poem itself; I know no higher ideal. And those poem-lines reveal what I know I need to see, the tangled yarn of lives intermingling, the familial that iconoclastic breaks the little idol of self and says the shards are what must learn to sing. And so here they do: chorus of kind shatter, “finitude or an attitude / of sparkle,” and those manifold glints which light this bewildered world. —Dan Beachy-Quick

"With microtones, concision, and graven diction, Keith Jones weaves taught and gorgeous lines to build his concise and affecting lyricism. blue lake of tensile fire is a terrific book. —Peter Gizzi

You You You—it’s what we all want to hear, isn’t it? At long last? Or think we do, until we stand in the merciless glare of desire, where we are toyed with, teasingly forgotten, actually forgotten, summoned back, worshipped, interrogated, frozen out, and longed for again by dizzying turns. Dia Felix finds her “you” in these poems, as every great poet eventually does, and takes the occasion to frolic in a genre she alternately deploys and dismantles so frequently—within poems, between lines—that in the end we glimpse nothing more than two bodies in strobelight. It’s what Dia wants: this undoing: luxury rubbing elbows with precarity, delirium with mundanity (does the frog living at the bottom of the sea “have to do his dishes or he just lets them soak?”), history with amoral urbanity in its perpetual present tense. To be in love and to discover, in one’s pocket, miraculously, a credit card. “If I were a nano-plane,/I’d fly right into your eyes.” “We spent all day in bed/giving each other awards.” Devotion is so fucked up. We pretend it’s just a (gendered) (inherited) trope-wheel, sometimes, for all the right reasons, but then spin it so fast anyway that it blinds us and all our friends and trashes the bedroom and wakes up everyone on the street. — Matt Longabucco

The narrator in "You You You" is entrenched in one of the greatest conundrums of life, how to love in a capitalist society where love can become a consumer good in a New York minute - how, in fact, to even exercise free will and break away from the socially compulsory to live an "authentic" life. Who among us knows that feels like? First, you must recognize and outwit the devil in all of his forms. Dia Felix is quick in her wit and on her feet. I am reminded that the the battle ground is always going to be language. This is a poetry that makes me believe that I am an angel of the sidewalk, word-playing my way out of debt and into sexual pleasure with another who may or may not be on the same journey, but let me give them the benefit of the doubt, "Let me put this afternoon on a credit card for you. / It’s worth it, it’s worth the laughter and the happiness on your fat face." This is a radical poetry that knows that when you have a job and can actually afford cheese, the right thing to do with it is put it in your butt. —Stacy Szymaszek

def jux dia felix

i like sexy poems! i like poems that reflect my habit of using the word fuck in my poems. i like poems about fucking if they’re written by women or queers or queer women or basically anyone but rusty professors screwing MFAs. the agonistic cry of desire manifests through sensorial delight in a key or a bug. i like dia felix because she is all of the above, except the part about professors. sure, i might be seduced by my predilection for reading about periods and pee and expensive european vibrators but i would suggest no subject’s as tedious as sex unless its baked in the writing. by which i mean you you you is brilliant not simply for its depiction of the arc of a love affair but also for its juxtaposition of seatmate and intimate. the ruffled surface and granite foundation. i call her mike drop. —Garrett Caples

These poems burn like effigies in the cheese section of a 24-hour grocery store, best read aloud with the specific languor of a non-holiday, in a bedroom, under the blankets to everyone who never bothers to rsvp. When I read Dia's words, I am shown that a grotto exists in a cavity is hollowed out of plenty and emptied anew. Dia's wisdom hides in cracks––Flaca is the phantom body, bff, nemesis, soulmate. Each page of YOU YOU YOU negotiates feast or famine: bread in a good mood, ice cream in Spain, and a simmering reduction when something calls for sweetness. I want to wrap this beautiful book in linen, anoint it with cedar oil, stuff it with myrrh and cinnamon and eat it at a wedding. —Charity Coleman

Sea Hypocrisy is a modest dazzle-camouflaged proposal for a spectacle world of death camp tourists and celebrity migrants circling this crisis Earth's blurred and turbulent lines, commons, markets, campsites, and seascapes. Zhou asks us "what have you done about this hoax called living?" By the time we fumble forth an answer we've already been rendered another other. Reading Zhou's work I was reminded of William Burroughs's routines, those short surreal and grotesque works of critical slapstick. There are moments in Sea Hypocrisy that are almost vaudevillian, achieving a frighteningly accurate rendition of what our world and worlds are being ramped up into: flickering global images of fickle and sinister empathy, vile comedy, the horrific moment where a rescue crew tosses down cameras in lieu of life preservers to a couple of suffering sea-lion refugees. In this work Zhou parses what’s at this very moment reaching into all of our bodies, motivating, vectoring, and hungrily replicating. - Jeremy Hoevenaar

A séance is a meeting at which people attempt to make contact with the dead, to receive or relay messages from spirits, and in this book the poet and his words are the vehicle, the body, through which these messages get relayed. And like any good séance, this one speaks in many tongues, a multilingual concoction of gringo talk, Spanish, “indiomas,” German, mathematics, and outer space. The ghosts are drinking “pulque backwash” at this séance (pulque, I gather, from both the traditional hole-in-the-wall pulquerias as well as the fancy yuppy mango and papaya-infused pulquerias you find in upper crust Mexico City or Brooklyn). At this séance hipsters and “avian-beings” are choking on the strange sounds that gurgle in this fusion of contemporary cultural politics and ancient Meso-American tradition. “We're othered in othering,” writes Moctezuma, and in this book the othering takes the form of a hybrid, border-crossing cosmic body “inflated by wrath and poverty and angelic sweat.” Here, “the pornography of human minutiae” is a system of transhistorical mythology combined with a radical poetic history where the early Americas (the colonial and the indigenous) fuse with the modern day Americans, the Ming Dynasty and the Ottoman empire to create a perverted, multi-headed beast. I don't know of another poet “borderzoning” quite like Moctezuma, whose Spring Tlaloc Séance expands the possibilities of what can be contained in unitedstatesian poetics. I am excited for what he'll do next. —Daniel Borzutzky

In This To Myself Kerin Sulock intertwines the historical and personal lyric into the magical. “What lesson could you teach me I haven't / already taught myself?” she asks, and that knowledge, like the language here is “blood-bound,” both inevitable and beautifully wrought, passed to the reader with the documentarian's fervor, the painter's eye for transformative detail, and the poet's haunting concision. This is a stunning debut, full of "heat [and] hover," and one of few I consider “crucial to surviving.” —Marni Ludwig

Jennifer Pilch's Sequoia Graffiti is a poetry of alchemy.  Tree trunks transform into timeline verse, and Pilch’s lyrical/list amalgam incises an accretion of inquiry and experience. This chapbook-length poem invites readers to investigate the writing on nature’s wall. Dynamic, stirring! —Martine Bellen

Even if you’re your own wished-for giant whose selfie is eclipsing, Sequoia faces can’t be fathomed without falling down and you are shrimp to them. Amen, I say to that, amen. Sequoias are the Daddies of Time and Jennifer Pilch is running their circumference. She’s brought the domestic of all her keys to scratch and moan a mythic dress. In wonder, detail and exhaustion, she threads their bulk and serial. Carve “me n’ her forever” on their girth…for sure the words last longer than living love. —Karen Garthe

Someone is Here is a haunting set of poems that delicately trace the contours & limits of language, forcing us to consider the ineffable things we lose in the process of communicating. Schapira writes poems to “vanish for the purposes of seeing.” —Justin Smith

A retroactive handbook for the language-bound, would-be instinctive part of being human, Someone is Here calls our received notions of causality into question, effecting “the collapse returning / one to the other.” With an incorporeal efficiency and pliability, Schapira traces borders between us and the world and between us in the world, asking, but not answering, which dotted lines to cut, which to fold and which to leave alone. —Kate Colby

Human speaks fox, fox speaks fox, fox unspeaks human? This is not minimalist per se, it’s expansive. Rowan Evans takes an intensity of encounter with urban place and focuses it through fox-person before projecting it brilliantly on the screen of the page. What we see are tight units of signs, what we hear are bursts and barks of sound, but behind these are vast histories of utterance, of connection with animals venturing close to human settlement, reclaiming human-claimed space. Rebuilding. Being present. The fox isn’t fable, it’s actual. Fox is fox. And the human observer is translating from both the real and fabulous. There are tomes of work and experience in this ‘small’ wonder writ large. Almost nothing more needs be said. Exquisite, haunting, necessary. —John Kinsella

To let myself be carried along by this page flyer-byer is also to pause for flashes of genuine collectivity, to feel the wiggly animism of everyday life. This book is an open-cupboard frankness, a blinking cursor, a rubbing of eyes which makes a reader wake up too. I feel cozily stashed in the mental bjorn of a poet as she scan-scans her lists, caches her dance cards, cashes her skywritten loves, and we go. On the train, in the store, we leave our drips, we pass the moments that will have been our lives. —Dia Felix

The self and the rocks and air, the beloved and the comrade, sonic music, “egret wisp” and “geological fact” and “the memory of a first unkindness” are pulverized and drifting in a gel or caught in a vector holding them suspended, swirling, and—as Angela Hume so elegantly shows us—that gel is history, toxic burden in the anthropocene, lyric poetry. The shared song of the individual mind (melos) can’t save us, and neither can the shattering warmth of sex. Although—as Hume so subtly reminds us—they do. —Frances Richard

Some of us don’t have a problem with the Mind-Body Problem; our mental state is embodied, our body is thought. This can make for a slippery “I” but as Fridman shows us, slippery means vibrantly alive. Her traveler is the “left/self” – the self left over, non-dominant, wrong – indefatigably surveying survival, friendship, and country, questioning each: What is physical? What is ghost? These poems are gasping and smitten. —Sommer Browning

An ambling celebration of the hyperlocal, scattering interiors and exteriors on the page, allowing us to walk along. – Maryrose Larkin

I’m drawn into the concerns this work proposes: the symbiosis of living within myriad contingencies and wonders. Awesome! – Brenda Iijima

We     introduce / ourselves      + / To Planets and / to      Flowers / But      with/ ourselves / Have
     Etiquettes / Embarrassments / And     awes     – Emily Dickinson*

“Overturn memory,” proclaims a line from Carand Burnet's Henhouse. As with hens tilling soil in a garden, Burnet's poems reveal and obscure a personal history. Each poem penetrates this history in a staccato pacing, drawing up facets which seem at once domestic and mythic. From these fragments Burnet hems together an altered language playfully and deftly, a language which tells us “nature fakes lawfulness,” and “Night would consume all day if it could.” — Phil Montenegro

THE DUMBEST QUESTION EVER is a series of electronic letters (emails) which venture into a delirious bricolage of technology, sex, urban decrepitude, Goldman Sachs, race, the active lives of objects, AFRICOM, the state of American black nationalism, betrayal, the occult, friendship, and the late despot Muammar Qaddafi--all to solve the mystery of a missing phone charger.

You can contact the DQE at thedqe AT gmail DOT com.

UNREDACTED version: in a special edition of 20. $20 (shipping included) Sold Out

In Memory of B. Lee:

B Lee is the meat and gristle, the joint chew and fluid cracked loose as we jostle her about and carry
her through our line.  B. Lee the leaf-tongued, the riser, the hyphen in bracken; B. Lee the whistle-
blower, the long on alert, the lyer-awake.

Michael McClure named his favorite motorcycle after B. Lee. They were related, though neither by
blood nor era. He even painted B. Lee on his helmet.  (He never wore the helmet.)  "What if I got
in an accident? That helmet would be ruined," he once radioed every trucker in Michigan.  "What
about your bike, or your own damn skull" some worried rational trucker C.B.'d.  McClure over and
outed: "I'd die instantly, but B. Lee would continue tearing up the highway."

"To have language for a thing/ you need a tongue or a finger/ pads at least."
 
Who was B. Lee anyway? Historians, biographers, astrologers, cosmologists,
cosmetologists, stenographers, and newspaper men will likely have all kinds of opinions…You
can only know for yourself and only for a can of beans because the concrete facts of her life seem
to "glisten between the membranes/ of cause and effect." That is to say, the life of B. Lee shines at
an edge that finds us simultaneous and unknowing. We can try to sleep on the "mower blade," but
it will be a rude and terrifying awakening. It seems to me that we had best "sing a little" to embrace
her legacy as a "taller tale" that only continues to grow or "we can all just lie down in a circle around
B. Lee and surround the body." It's life or death because "in this hollow there is only one/ building
one room." I know where I'll be. She taught me that.

body puts it a/way

the body" (w)here

when she comes and half-again

to be here of us which is what you have (to

be/come responsible for giving her

a bodysome ceremony

She is a time traveler for the carnival. She keeps lists of islands in her. She is a giant. She has alpacas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBXr15K2uSc

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS 3 includes poems by: Ricardo Maldonado, Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Steven Karl, Rebecca Lehmann, Jared Schickling, Brandon Shimoda, Paula Cisewski, Jessica Richardson, Brian Teare, Jane Wong, Daniela Olszewska, Jennifer Karmin, Nate Slawson, Michelle Taransky, and Jen Tynes.

I wonder at times what a genuinely philosophical poetry might look like; I know it wouldnt look like philosophy. I suspect it might bear real resemblance to the poems that Lucy Ives is writing in Novel. Such poems accept confusion without reveling in it. Such poems trouble themselves by working toward song in the very realm where thought and perception divide and grow quarrelsome. They forsake Truth with its capital T for truthfulness: an attention to consequence, a willingness to become complicated without false reverence thereof, "the knot so language would have / mention // of what it later did." These are poems remarkably without idols; and by that I simply mean that these poems seek to "follow one's understanding rather / than resisting." It just happens to be the truthful case that one doesn't always understand ones understanding, and the pleasure of the poem is inextricable from its necessity: an accompaniment into the world that refuses to be domesticated by thought, the very world in which one loves what she loves, the very world in which one makes her home. — Dan Beachy-Quick

Stripped of adornment but not of song, Rob Ostrom's Nether and Qualms reminds us of the link between the essential and the incantatory:

Lord,            I saw
hundreds in grey     fly

from         J    's

mouth.

Are those animal technologies? Is this a Byzantine modernity? Can a voice tell us it's not here? Yes, yes, yes; relax into your discomfort. With "a single orange the only light," Ostrom hands you the oblivion you need to see. — Samuel Amadon

Had my moderation in prosperity been equal to my noble birth and fortune, I should have entered this city as your friend rather than as your captive; and you would not have disdained to receive, under a treaty of peace, a king descended from illustrious ancestors and ruling many nations. My present lot is as glorious to you as it is degrading to myself. I had men and horses, arms and wealth. What wonder if I parted with them reluctantly? If you Romans choose to lord it over the world, does it follow that the world is to accept slavery? Were I to have been at once delivered up as a prisoner, neither my fall nor your triumph would have become famous. My punishment would be followed by oblivion, whereas, if you save my life, I shall be an everlasting memorial of your clemency. — Caractacus

Much like the weather last winter when we heard simultaneously things never heard before at the same time--shouts of "mussels," "shrimp," and "watercress"--so that someone who was attentive to a particular shout at one moment would think it was winter, then spring, and then midsummer, while anyone who heard them all would think that nature had become confused and that the world would not last until Easter. — Soren Kierkegaard

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS 2 includes poems by: Jared White, Cecily Parks, Brian Foley, Phil Cordelli, Lily Brown, Alice Notley, A K Beck, Kate Schapira, Heather Palmer, Linnea Ogden, Friedrich Kerksieck, Bronwen Tate, Emily Jones, Dot Devota, Anne Shaw, John Harkey, Genevieve Kaplan, Carol Ciavonne, Justin Runge, Elisabeth Workman, Rachel Beck, Sarah Fox, Kate Thorpe, Nathan Hauke, and Kirsten Jorgenson.

Glassscape reflects quizzically upon the work of media, electronic and otherwise, its own included. Barely contained by the columnar rectitude they're given on the page, the poems accent lexical disquiet and concatenation, scatlike sonic momentum and wry, jump-cut observation. Pleasure, edification and intrigue lock arms in a heady mix of the arcane and the quotidian. — Nathaniel Mackey

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS includes poems by: Michael Schiavo, Patrick Masterson, Erin Lyndal Martin, Farrah Field, Paige Taggart, Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, Amanda Nadelberg, Adam Clay, Fred Schmalz, Andy Gricevich, Ryan Murphy, Rachel Moritz, Ben Estes, Tony Mancus, Leora Silverman Fridman, Nate Pritts, and Joseph Wood.

Opening with Derrida's neologistic and punning declaration, Behold animalogos, Mary Hickman puts the problematics of distinction at the center of this work. Her deft play among the particularities of species, even as far as (con)fusing the lines between the plant and animal worlds, has us constantly questioning the nature of being, its permanence and mutability. But more important, her work also makes us reconsider our affinities and loyalties, examine what it means to recognize (to "re-cognize") the others around us, and face the ramifications of acknowledging their otherness while maintaining a concomitant vigilance over the distances that recognition can create. Hickman has succeeded in presenting ethically crucial material in startlingly vibrant, enlivening language. — Cole Swensen

Here is a poetry of breath and breadth, crafted with honesty, clarity and grace. Here is a world sensed by more than sight, a wide-ranging sense which seeks out spaces between interior and exterior, organic and mechanical, intimate and foreign, and would be familiar to Whitman or Artaud. In the choked environment of our time, this work is porous, sustaining, vital. Drink it in. — Phil Cordelli

In "Another Limit," Linnea Ogden maps a skeptic's fugitive geography of the imagination. In poems with titles like "Submerged Lands Act," this poet continuously draws and redraws the jurisdiction of her literary consciousness, always seeking "the answer to this particular border / dispute" in poems of considerable formal grace and emotional honesty. — Srikanth Reddy

Linnea Ogden explores boundaries both thematically and in her syntax. But most amazing: she makes legal language sing. — Rosmarie Waldrop

"You are walking toward gunshots on this road," Thomas Hummel writes (or is it cites?) "while the steppe is asking for songs," and the relations within and between these two clauses—tense, uncertain, quite possibly accidental—is like that between almost any two sentences in this striking, important new work. Is "toward" in this case spatial or temporal? Does "while" mean "at the same time" or "whereas"? Hummel notes that this is a "work of collage," meaning most of its sentences originally appeared in contexts that limited their meaning. Here, unmoored, they realize their potential strangeness, and find themselves arranged by a random integer generator to take on the "arbitrary nature of the organic world." Yet what surprises the reader most about this work isn't the way it evades meaning in favor of mere being, or even the way it places gunshots where we expect songs. It is instead the fact that it captures throughout its pages the act of significance cutting through the bramble of its language, insisting itself into graspability, and against all odds. If the condition of the work is classic melancholia ("He was empty inside, and he could see no exciting project or absorbing task into which he could throw himself"), it is one of its most radical, affecting, and perfect manifestations in recent memory. — Timothy Donnelly

His poems, his music, his game, his friendships are here, suggesting that Thibault Raoult takes seriously the conflict of his roles. As a writer, he insistently remains an amateur, going beyond what he knows. El P.E. reads as a kind of radical blessing, an expressive, unconsummated poetics in which we encounter cycles of cultural narrative rendered through an incontrovertibly particular language (of tribe, an ordo vagorum). Raoult's enthusiastic attentiveness to expression, pleasure, and polysemous meanings stokes a poetry that is, always in glimpses, perversely funny, turbulent, and whammo, alive. — Forrest Gander

Noun and verb, agent and act. Constantly searching and endlessly reiterative, Samuel Amadon's Spy Poem is the "little gray man" embodied. Visible when it chooses and vanishing at will, this work is just fast enough to stay ahead of us but never risks capture. His is a poetics of clandestinity. With its beautifully staggered and seamless syllabics, the poem is a dissection of artifice within an artifice: how we shape what we leave, how we choose what we show, how we say what we say once we've made the choice to say it. Samuel Amadon is watching. Get in the car. — Thomas Hummel