1. Porneia by Eduardo Kac
Internationally recognized for his works in telepresence and bioart, Kac presents here, translated into English for the first time, his early political poems and performance texts from his early career in Brazil.
2. Togetherness by Wo Chan
A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.
3. How to be Invisible by Kate Bush
Selected and arranged by the author, with an expansive introduction by the novelist David Mitchell, How To Be Invisible presents the lyrics of Kate Bush for the first time in a beautiful cloth-bound edition.
4. Nane: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani
The limited-edition box set is a project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks every year by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.
5. Obsolete Spells from Victor Neuburg & the Vine Press
A collection of rare pagan poetry and purple prose from the heart of the 1920s counterculture. Obsolete Spells offers a selection of Neuburg’s work and others from Vine Press books–over-the-top hymns to the Old Gods, tales from a utopian landscape, and more, most of which have been out of print for a century.
6. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen
What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?
Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorizations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.
7. Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones
Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses.
8. A Boy in the City by S. Yarberry
A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.
9. Notes on Shapeshifting by Gabi Abrão
Gabi Abrāo’s Notes on Shapeshifting is an ode to existing in physical form, fully aware of the changing energy that flows through every aspect of it. As Abrāo writes, “tapping into the ether body to take a break from the demands of the earth body, / making peace with ephemerality, / lightness, / shapeshifting”. Throughout this collection, you are invited to travel through various states; pure infatuation to heartbreak, confidence to defeat, from a skepticism for living to a full-on trust in it. And Notes on Shapeshifting yearns to soothe and arouse along the way.
10. La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space by Banah el Ghadbanah
In this collection, each poem flows like water on the page. The author weaves in stories و mantras و revolutionary messages و the movement of arabic letters و the memory of Sumerian cuneiform. This book is a hybrid creature between poem-story-form that crosses genres like it crosses dimensions. In this work, you are the mermaid. You are the forever migrant, a traveler between the oceanic and the extraterrestrial, across continents and planets. You are a time traveler, and you speak many languages. You are LA SYRENA, conjuring your own space to feel free.
