This Saturday, June 18th, join us for an event celebrating the work of Hannah Weiner, who features in the current Attention Line group show there. This event is in person and online, and includes the talented Jennifer Bartlett, Darcie Dennigan, Farnoosh Fathi, James Sherry, Susan Bee, Judith Goldman, Declan Gould, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, and Phill Niblock.

Saturday, June 18
1pm (Eastern)
11 Cortlandt Alley and Online

In conjunction with the exhibition Attention Line, Artists Space and Zoeglossia present an afternoon celebration of Hannah Weiner’s work and life. The event will include a multi-voice reading of Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal as well as a panel of thinkers and artists who were close to Weiner’s visionary poetry practice. The event is free to the public in-person at Artists Space and will also be broadcast live on Zoom here.

BRIAN KIM STEFANS presents FESTIVALS OF PATIENCE

The syllabics of Rimbaud continue to scorch as they raise their wings in triumphant glare. These translations by Brian Kim Stefans both soar and mesmerically nettle with language that continuously hurtles epiphanies. Rimbaud’s images so unlimit the reader that their energy suffuses consciousness with lingual ozone not unlike transmuted cobalt.–Will Alexander

Now through Monday May 2nd, let’s celebrate May Day by building a revolutionary book shelf! These books are half price:

TOMATOES + WHY DOESN’T THE FAR LEFT READ LITERATURE? BY NATHALIE QUINTANE, TRANSLATED BY MARTY HIATT

FESTIVALS OF PATIENCE: THE VERSE POEMS OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD, TRANSLATED BY BRIAN KIM STEFANS

CORONAVIRUS HAIKU BY WORKER WRITERS SCHOOL, EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY MARK NOWAK

TITULO / TITLE BY LEGNA RODRIGUEZ IGLESIAS, TRANSLATED BY KATHERINE M. HEDEEN

THE CHILEAN FLAG BY ELVRIA HERNANDEZ, TRANSLATED BY ALEC SCHUMACHER

THERE THREE AND THE GRAND COMPLICATION BY DEVIN KING

PARTISAN OF THINGS BY FRANCIS PONGE, TRANSLATED BY JOSHUA COREY AND JEAN-LUC GARNEAU

TARNAC, A PREPARATORY ACT BY JEAN-MARIE GLEIZE, TRANSLATED BY JOSHUA CLOVER, ABIGAIL LANG AND BONNIE ROY

JUANA I BY ANA ARZOUMANIAN, TRANSLATED BY GABRIEL AMOR

This fall, Kenning Editions will publish Charlie Markbreiter‘s first book, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella. Pre-order a copy now, or sit tight all summer for the print and electronic editions to materialize.

Meanwhile, if you are in New York, Charlie is reading in the Milk and Henny Experience tomorrow. Can’t get there? Scroll through this and read some of what Charlie has been up to.

Lucy Ives says:

A requiem for Lauren Berlant wrapped in a reanimation of the deeply of-its-time prep-school soap, Charlie Markbreiter’s novella is also a beautiful, relentlessly inventive page-turner of an essay of autotheory. I didn’t watch Gossip Girl and now I’ll never need to, because Markbreiter has created a realer, weirder, freer projection—a series of interconnected worlds where the dead speak, get high, watch TV; philosophers compete; and familiar characters chew the scenery while an enigmatic television writer leads us gingerly toward a reconciliation with love.

“Imagine a theatre shorn of its ankle bells. Imagine its flamboyant solidity, its egregious color. What would you then have? Why, a perfect home to put the spirit on trial.” —Jay Wight, “Aria”

This fall, Kenning Editions and Every house has a door will co-publish a two volume set of the selected plays of Jay Wright. Pre-order your copy of each today!

Volume one is entitled The Dramatic Radiance of Number and was selected by Jay Wright. The second volume is entitled Figurations and Dedications and was selected by Lois Wright. A third volume, a collection of essays on Wright’s work as a playwright, will arrive next summer. The whole series is edited by performance philosopher Will Daddario, designed by Crisis Studio, and typeset by Cory Rockliff.

Celebrate the success of Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer and their efforts to unionize at Amazon with a cheap copy of Coronavirus Haiku by Worker Writers School. That book is on sale for the next week. Buy it here, not on Amazon.

Kenning Editions is proud to announce the publication of Nathalie Quintane‘s Tomatoes + Why doesn’t the far left read literature? translated from the French by Marty Hiatt, and with a foreword by Juliana Spahr.

Tomatoes can be read as an inventory of what society as it is, in the extreme contemporary, makes of us…a short book we meditate on for a long time.–L’Humanité (2010)

Nathalie Quintane…experiments with the possibility of a new insurgent writing. For this, the author performs a double gesture. It begins by recognizing the caesura that separates the words of yesterday from those of today…Once this caesura is marked, she affirms that it is not a question of rehashing the formulas of the past. If it is necessary to find these, it is to be better able to draw up an inventory, without arrogance, in all lucidity…This text reads like a prose poem.–Le Monde (2011)

…one question here is “why don’t you read literature, or what is generally understood by the term ‘literature’, any more, or why do you read less?” Quintane writes this after stating that she is the “far left.” And presents this as a question for the far left. In some ways this is not a question unique to the far left. It is a question that could be asked even by those who identify as liberal and who thus own almost all the literature, at least in the thing that is the United States…Quintane has done us a favor and pointed a way forward for us. She has written something that appears to be about being French but is also about being American and yet is not global. We are not all in the same literature. We just have to negotiate similar structural conditions.–Juliana Spahr (2022)

Quintane and Hiatt will be reading alongside Rob Halpern, Adalber Salas Hernández, and Robin Myers on February 5th via livestream–free, no registrations, robotic “reminders,” or “tickets.” Simply tune in here. More details on the event here.

Kenning Editions presents a free, trans-national, tri-lingual reading featuring Nathalie Quintane, Rob Halpern, and Adalber Salas Hernández, with translators Marty Hiatt and Robin Myers. Celebrating new books from Kenning Editions: The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández, translated by Robin Myers; Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World, by Rob Halpern; and Tomatoes by Nathalie Quintane, translated by Marty Hiatt. The reading will live stream on Youtube Saturday, February 5th at 2:30 PM CST (Chicago) / 9:30 PM CET (Paris). Follow the link: https://youtu.be/8BvVmsI2CMk

NATHALIE QUINTANE was born in Paris in 1964 and is the author of over twenty books of experimental poetry and genre-defying prose. She famously wrote a book about a shoe and ran a parody literary journal in the 1990s with Christophe Tarkos and Stéphane Bérard. In recent years (beginning with Tomates in 2009), her work has come to directly address particular political issues, including the plight of refugees in Europe, the gilets jaunes and Nuit debout movements, the Front nationale, and France’s colonial legacies. Keenly aware of how aesthetics, language, and politics are related, she critiques political and critical languages by practicing her own alternatives. Her style is incisive and droll, using wordplay to make cutting political arguments, and her texts have a light and vital energy that likely comes from her quasi-improvised approach to composition. Quintane is considered one of the major experimental poets of her generation; Tomatoes is only her second book-length work available in English, after Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais’s translation of Jeanne Darc.

MARTY HIATT is a poet and translator from Melbourne. He is a co-founder of the Gegensatz Translation Collective and also works for the Artichoke Reading and Translation Series in Berlin. His translations from the French include “Survival” by Danielle Collobert, and “The Vintage” by Guillaume Apollinaire. MATERIALS/MATERIALIEN released his full-length book of poetry, Paraphrenia, in 2019, and he occasionally publishes poetry as Bulky News Press. He received a Research Stipend for Non-German Literature from the Berliner Senat in 2021.

ROB HALPERN lives between San Francisco and Yspilanti, Michigan, where he organizes the Writers’ Bloc Poetry Workshop inside Women’s Huron Valley Prison, while teaching at Eastern Michigan University. His books include include Weak Link (Atelos 2019), Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse 2015), and Music for Porn (Nightboat Books 2012). Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he co-edited From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (Contemporary Practice), which was listed among Entropy’s “Best Non-Fiction” books of 2017. Halpern’s critical and lyrical essays appear in Mediations, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, and Chicago Review, as well as the edited volumes Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, and Political Poetics: Poetry and Communism. He is the editor of Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays (Nightboat 2020). Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World is just out from Kenning Editions.

ADALBER SALAS HERNÁNDEZ—poet, essayist, and translator—was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is La ciencia de las despedidas (Pre-Textos). He has published five collections of essays, as well as numerous translations from Portuguese, English, and French; these include works by Marguerite Duras, Antonin Artaud, Charles Wright, Mário de Andrade, Hart Crane, Pascal Quignard, Mark Strand, Lorna Goodison, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Boyer, Frankétienne, and Patrick Chamoiseau. He has been a member of the editorial board for Revista POESÍA and Buenos Aires Poetry. He coordinates the collection Diablos Danzantes published by Amargord Ediciones and is pursuing a Ph.D. at New York University. The Science of Departures is his debut volume to be published in the United States.

ROBIN MYERS is a poet and translator based in Mexico City. Recent translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She was among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). Selected translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Baffler, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry.

Kenning Editions is a small, non-profit literary publisher, trafficking in the sorts of things the big publishers cannot and will not support. When you support Kenning Editions, you make vital, experimental writing accessible. You realize contemporary poetics. We are grateful to be thriving at this moment, and we owe it all to you, our co-conspirators.

Supporters earn recognition, free books, and more. Subscribers receive everything, hot off the press. Help us realize an ambitious production schedule this year, including new books by David Larsen, Jay Wright, Holly Melgard, Charlie Markbreiter, Connie Scozzaro, Devin King, and others. Donations are tax deductible, and at most levels a subscription comes right along with it.

Already a supporter? Consider gifting a subscription to a friend.

Just out: Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World, by Rob Halpern and The Science of Departures, by Adalber Salas Hernández, translated by Robin Myers. Coming soon is Tomatoes + Why Doesn’t the Far Left Read Literature? by Nathalie Quintane, translated by Marty Hiatt. We will celebrate Valentine’s Day with a transnational reading featuring all three books–stay tuned for details.

Rob Halpern’s new sequence of poems speaks to social, environmental, and personal crisis—from white supremacist violence and wildfires raging just north of San Francisco, to the death of his father—all of which are tempered by the joyful birth of his daughter, whose new life offers relief in the darkness. He calls the poems “hieroglyphs” with a tip of the hat to Marx, for whom the “hieroglyphic” appearance of the world translates “the secret” of our catastrophe. But as Halpern notes, “the secret of the thing may well be that there is no secret.” Here, investigation, analysis, and healing converge, as Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World tests the promise and the failure of cultural production, specifically lyric poetry, in the midst of disaster. In his afterword to the book, Halpern asks, “Can the moment arrested by the poem’s burnished amber show us something we don’t already know about the world?” And if not, what is the social function of the poem? Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but this book attempts a response. The book concludes with a new essay by Halpern, “For a Hieroglyphic Poetics.”

The Science of Departures is a book of goodbyes. Each poem in Adalber Salas Hernández’s collection speaks to a different kind of farewell: death, estrangement, illness, dispossession, decomposition, banishment, stories forgetfully or oppressively re-written over time, the painful discrepancy between language and experience. Some address historical figures or speak in their voices. Others explore the body (living, dead, and in transit): where it goes, the borders it traverses, what it’s forced to leave behind. Informed both by classical literature and contemporary Venezuelan politics, by twentieth-century history and high school biology class, by Twitter and the Old Testament, by the cynicism of bureaucracy and the wonder of parenthood, these poems register loss, condemn subjugation, and marvel at the music humans can make when we try to speak of it all.

ADALBER SALAS HERNÁNDEZ—poet, essayist, and translator—was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is La ciencia de las despedidas (Pre-Textos). He has published five collections of essays, as well as numerous translations from Portuguese, English, and French; these include works by Marguerite Duras, Antonin Artaud, Charles Wright, Mário de Andrade, Hart Crane, Pascal Quignard, Mark Strand, Lorna Goodison, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Boyer, Frankétienne, and Patrick Chamoiseau. He has been a member of the editorial board for Revista POESÍA and Buenos Aires Poetry. He coordinates the collection Diablos Danzantes published by Amargord Ediciones and is pursuing a Ph.D. at New York University.

ROBIN MYERS is a poet and translator based in Mexico City. Recent translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She was among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). Selected translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Baffler, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry.

Get this and all of our forthcoming titles by subscription or by becoming a supporter of Kenning Editions, a 501c3 non-profit.

My name is Patrick Durgin and I founded Kenning Editions in 1998. Back then, it was a journal. Now, we publish paperback books. I say “we” because, although I am the sole full-time worker, Kenning Editions is really a community: of authors, designers, board members, and other co-conspirators. I say “conspiracy” because we strive to realize and make accessible books that most commercial presses and many independents would not consider viable. Viability has everything, for us, to do with quality and commitment. Our missions statement is this:

Since 1998, Kenning Editions has been exploring the tensions between aesthetic quality and political commitment. We are interested in poetry, poetics, art, drama, and hybrid genre literary and critical writing that is experimental in the fullest sense: formally daring and close to lived experience. We publish new and archival writing from the United States, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere, often in translation.

As a 501c3 non-profit organization, Kenning Editions relies on the support of individuals—readers, really—to maintain this mission.

I am writing to you now to ask you to donate. If you do, you will support the publication of many new titles and also help keep back titles in print. Forthcoming titles include Zeroes Were Hollow, by David Larsen, and Tomatoes, by Nathalie Quintane, translated by Marty Hiatt, with a foreword by Juliana Spahr. Also in the works are new books by Charlie Markbreiter, Holly Melgard, Adalber Salas Hernández, and Connie Scozzaro. In collaboration with the performance company Every house has a door, we are publishing an ambitious three-volume set devoted to the plays of renowned American poet Jay Wright, with the first volume due this spring. A little further down the line is a selected poems of Elvira Hernández, translated by Alec Schumacher—whose translation of The Chilean Flag was long listed for ALTA’s National Poetry Award for 2020.

Here is what some of our co-conspirators believe:

There’s only one press I want to be working with in America today: Kenning Editions. They’re low to the ground and continue to operate with the DIY, mimeograph spirit they started with while, in the past decade, releasing some of the most pro-level, innovative work in the small-press sphere: Trisha Low, Ana Arzoumanian, Jesse Seldess, Laura Elrick, Pamela Lu. Who else is publishing Kevin Killian’s batshit bongo-party plays? This means that any level of donation helps; even five dollars could help them with printing costs for any one of their exciting upcoming books: Nathalie Quintane’s Tomatoes, David Larsen’s Zeroes Were Hollow, and two volumes of plays by Jay Wright.

—Devin King, author of The Grand Complication and There Three

Kenning Editions is the ideal home for Coronavirus Haiku. That we were able to edit, design, and produce such a gorgeous volume in such a timely manner during, and as response to, the global Covid-19 pandemic speaks volumes to both the hard work and social vision of Patrick and his fabulous co-workers. Kenning Editions is precisely the kind of independent publisher that needs to be supported in increasing amounts because the books they print are vital testaments to our times.

—Mark Nowak, editor, Coronavirus Haiku, by Worker Writers School

Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe was printed in April, 2020. This volume is unconventional in its form and purpose, lending insight into the pedagogical efforts of Audre Lorde. Dream of Europe compiles seminars, readings and interviews by Audre Lorde across Western Europe between 1984 and 1992, printed along with the poetry of Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Haki R. Madhubuti and June Jordan among other figures of American counter culture and the Civil Rights Movement. Dream of Europe was an ambitious editorial project, only possible by the lucid vision of Kenning Editions.

—Mayra Rodriguez Castro, editor, Dream of Europe

Want to help? Go to our website, Kenningeditions.com, and click “Donate?” Choose a level or name your own, and you will receive premiums, such as a subscription. We can accept checks made out to “Kenning Editions NFP” at 834 Columbian Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302. Already a supporter or subscriber? Then please consider telling a friend, even forwarding this notice, and continue to spread the word!

Thank you,

Patrick