Short missives from Kenning Editions authors, with insights into their relationships to their own books. Have a look, and then consider donating or subscribing. Becoming a supporter of Kenning Editions is to literally constitute Kenning Editions. We are a 501(c)3 non-profit, and whatever you give is tax deductible. Click here to learn more about the 2018-2019 season.

Kenning Editions is proud to announce the publication of The Dirty Text by acclaimed Afro-Cuban poet Soleida Ríos, in a fully bilingual edition translated by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott, and featuring an afterword by Kristin Dykstra. This book is edited by Daniel Borzutzky.

The Dirty Text (El Texto Sucio) is Ríos’s first book to appear in English. Written in the 1990s in Cuba, it is a book of poems, a book of stories and, most vividly, a book of dreams. As poet Rosa Alcalá writes, Ríos’ writings are “indescribable manifestations of a poetics unfastened to mode, genre, or category.” In this book, human eyes appear beneath other human eyes, snakes materialize with three heads, and the bodies of loved ones duplicate, disintegrate or speak to ghosts and Gods. It is a book about the possibilities of language and literature to articulate our relationship to the communities we occupy and the communities we imagine, a book that disentangles the lines between our conscious lives and our unconscious lives, what we imagine and what we experience.

Read more about The Dirty Text here. It is available also as part of the Kenning Editions subscription scheme or as a premium when you donate. Small Press Distribution carries the book, as ever.

Kevin Killian’s “Spreadeagle” was once just a novel but is now also an exhibit. It opens Friday, November 3rd, at Iceberg Projects here in Chicago. Kevin’s Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater is forthcoming this February from Kenning Editions.

Here is an interview with Ana Arzoumanian and Gabriel Amor about their collaboration resulting in Juana I. It is a wonderful and funny rumination on merged identities and staggered rhythms.

GA: Había párrafos en los que yo me preguntaba “quién está tocando a quién” y tenía que preguntar, rompiendo un poco el misterio. También diciendo “Ana, esta imagen es erótica o sexual”. En un principio no nos conocíamos tan bien y ella me decía: “si te parece que lo es, es que lo es”. Después ya no tenía que preguntar.

AA: Gabriel fue un traductor soñado. Fue el novio de Juana (ríe).

The King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University presents a reading by Ana Arzoumanian and translator Gabriel Amor on Wednesday, September 26, 7:00 PM. Admission is free and open to the public.

This reading introduces the bilingual edition of Ana Arzoumanian’s Juana I to American audiences. Arzoumanian’s genre-defying tour de force is delivered via a trance-like, first person narration that collapses time and space. It is both a love poem to and poetic justice for Juana of Castile, aka “Juana la Loca,” the mad queen of Spain.

Arzoumanian and Amor return to the United States to read at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago on March 21st, 2019. Check their events schedule or kenningeditions.com for details, as they come available.

ABOUT ANA ARZOUMANIAN

Ana Arzoumanian is a prolific and celebrated poet. She has also been a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; a professor at the International Postgraduate Program in Creative Writing, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences; a Lacanian psychoanalyst; and a professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad del Salvador, Faculty of Legal Sciences of Buenos Aires. Arzoumanian remains an active literary and theater critic, and has traveled extensively to read her poetry. She collaborated on the documentary A Dialogue Without Borders about the Armenian genocide and the disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship. This is the first full-length English-language translation of her work in the U.S.

ABOUT GABRIEL AMOR

Born in Galicia, Spain, Gabriel Amor has lived in New York since the age of five. He has published translations of poetry and prose by numerous Latin American writers, and received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his work on Juana I. Amor has collaborated with other artists on multimedia performances and was a producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There. He is Program Director of Postbaccalaureate Studies at Columbia University.

MEANWHILE

We here at Kenning Editions have just instituted the most generous subscription plan ever, $75.00 for six + books, direct-mail, postage paid (domestic orders only). This includes Soleida Ríos’ The Dirty Text, translated by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott, with an essay by Kristin Dykstra. The book is officially released in late October, but it is ready to ship to subscribers now!

Soleida Ríos (b. 1950) is an acclaimed Cuban poet whose work draws from Afro-Cuban traditions as well as writers as diverse as Juan Rulfo and Aimé Cesaire. She has published fourteen books from 1977 to the present, and The Dirty Text (El Texto Sucio) is her first book to appear in English. Written in the 1990s in Cuba, it is a book of poems, a book of stories and, most vividly, a book of dreams. As poet Rosa Alcalá writes, Ríos’ writings are “indescribable manifestations of a poetics unfastened to mode, genre, or category.” In this book, human eyes appear beneath other human eyes, snakes materialize with three heads, and the bodies of loved ones duplicate, disintegrate or speak to ghosts and Gods. It is a book about the possibilities of language and literature to articulate our relationship to the communities we occupy and the communities we imagine. The Dirty Text received a major literary award from the Alejo Carpentier Foundation, and her 2013 collection Estrías won the Nicolás Guillén award. Ríos was also recognized with the National Literary Critics Award in 2014.

Subscribe to Kenning Editions and receive all books in our 2018-2019 season, including Ana Arzoumanian’s Juana I, Soleida Ríos’ The Dirty Text, Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini, and Kevin Killian’s Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater. By the summer months of 2019, you will also have in hand Devin King’s The Grand Complication and The Pine-Woods Notebook, by Craig Dworkin. And shortly thereafter, expect to receive The Chilean Flag, by Elvira Hernández, translated by Alec Schumacher and with an introduction by Cecilia Vicuña. Subscribers also receive a random chapbook from the Ordinance series (2015-2017), while supplies last. Ordinance books include titles by Daniel Borzutzky, Janelle Rebel, Daniel Spangler, Andrew Durbin, Cassandra Troyan, Carla Harryman, and Steven Zultanski, among others.

Your subscription is the most direct way to support the press’ ongoing efforts to make important new writing available. In the U.S., a subscription of $75.00 is postage paid. International subscribers incur a shipping charge of $15.00.

Kevin Killian, co-editor of The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, and author of the forthcoming Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater, writes for McSweeney’s a think piece called

IMAGINE IF YOU CAN THE DEATH OF THE PRISON HOUSE

And it’s awfully good.

Maybe it was always in the cards that the United States should forget it was planned, by some lights, to be a good place. Can I even publish my hopes for armed revolution here?

We have been busy. Here is what to expect over the next several months.

This October, we will release El Texto Sucio / The Dirty Text by Soleida Ríos, translated by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott, and edited by Daniel Borzutzky.

By the end of November, we expect to unveil Kevin Killian’s selected plays, entitled Stage Fright.

In February, look for The Pine-Woods Notebook, by Craig Dworkin.

And in the spring, we will proudly publish Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini, edited by Faride Mereb, and translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig.

Along with that comes The Grand Complication, by Devin King.

And eventually, The Chilean Flag by Elvira Hernández, translated by Alec Schumacher. Hernández was recently awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize.

Details on each title will follow shortly before publication.

Here is where you subscribe to receive them all, plus other goodies. And if you appreciate Kenning Editions’ efforts to bring important new and archival writing into existence as bona fide books, then please consider becoming a supporter.

We are gradually populating http://www.instagram.com/kenningeditions/ with eye candy for you. Note a short video leafing through the very rare 2004 chapbook Syrup Hits.

Elvira Hernández was announced as the winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize yesterday, a major accolade for a writer who deserves more recognition. Under the auspices of editor Daniel Borzutzky, Kenning Editions will publish Hernández’s “La Bandera de Chile” (The Chilean Flag) in 2019.

The prize committee praised Hernández’s work, saying she “uses an intimate language but does not stop talking and referring to the real world, to contingent issues, with a special irony and a clear and delicate pen, which has managed to capture many young Latin American readers.” More here.

Anne Lesley Selcer on Dolores Dorantes’ Style:

With its taunting, sexual, and threatening lyric of white-hot energetic overcoming, Style offers an alternative lexicon for surviving.

Read this astonishing essay at Jacket2.org

Kenning authors Jean-Marie Gleize and Steven Zultanski join a rich bill of authors reading June 29-30 as part of the Sussex Poetry Festival. Details here.

Or read on:

The Ninth Annual Sussex Poetry Festival will take place over Friday and Saturday, 29th and 30th June 2018.

This year the festival will take place at the Rose Hill, on Rose Hill Terrace, behind London Road, Brighton.

The festival, as always, will feature readings from some of the most exciting contemporary poets, and will host local, national, and international performers.

READERS:

Janani Ambikapathy

Janani Ambikapathy is finishing up a PhD at the University of Cambridge and working on a poetry pamphlet ‘Are Language and I the Same People’. She is also a translator and assistant editor with Almost Island.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. Her recent work in various genres appears in Poetry Northwest, The Shallow Ends, The Recluse, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. She lives in Maryland and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College.

Ashley Barr

Ashley Barr is a current student at the University of Sussex and a recent graduate of Boise State University’s MFA program. She grew up in Boise, Idaho and once wrote a chapbook called Call the Bees to Come (dancing girl press).

Brandon Brown

Brandon Brown is the author of five books of poetry and several chapbooks, as well as three collaborative volumes of Christmas poems with J. Gordon Faylor, most recently The Cloth Bag. His poems and prose have recently appeared in Art in America, Open Space, Fanzine, Art Practical, New American Writing, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Best American Experimental Writing. In 2015, he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2018 was awarded the inaugural Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. He is an editor at Krupskaya and occasionally publishes small press materials under the imprint OMG! His newest full-length book is The Four Seasons (Wonder, forthcoming 2018). He lives in El Cerrito, California.

Alex Connor

Alex Connor is a musician and poet who completed his bachelors in English Literature and Music this year. Inspired by the writing of Neruda, O’Hara, Cummings and Ginsberg, Alex is interested in minimalist, narrative and personal writing.

Leah Coughlan

Leah Coughlan is a 21 year old student flittering between North London and Sussex University. Her poetry is simply what a gal has to do to not have a mental break down. The world is fucking jarring, and this bitch is just tryna navigate through it. You’ll be surprised at the extent to which flowers and fucking relate to each other – and not just in a Georgia O’Keefe way. Expect to feel uncomfortable as an alternative perspective attempts to replace these repetitive narratives of power.

Amy De’Ath

Amy De’Ath’s most recent poetry publication is On My Love for Gender Abolition (New York: Capricious, 2016). She is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London, and is currently working on her first critical book, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics. She has written a number of essays on contemporary poetry, gender, and value-form theory.

Helen Dixon

Helen Dixon is a britacananica queer feminist writer. Much of her work is bilingual Spanish/English and she’s also worked in theatre, radio and TV drama. She has two books of poetry and poetic prose: Flight Over the Abyss/Vuelo sobre el abismo (Nicaraguan Writers Union CNE Managua 2003) and Olimpia/Olympia (beyond borders, Reykjavik 2006). Her writing has been included in five anthologies and in literary publications in Canada, Canary Islands, Mexico, Nicaragua, Brazil, Cuba, and the UK. Helen is also part of the Devil’s Dyke Network.

Honor Gavin

Honor Gavin takes a multi-platform approach to the creative and the critical, involving music, performance and collaborations with groups such as Theatrum Mundi. She is the author of a monograph on modernist literature and film, and of an exuberant, experimental novel, Midland (2014), which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Uncommon Building (2017), her most recent publication, documents a collaborative exercise in speculative fiction, a collective ‘excavation’ of a fictional building.

Jean-Marie Gleize and Abigail Lang (trans.)

Jean-Marie Gleize is the author of over twenty books in France. He published his first book (on Francis Ponge) in 1981, and became a professor at l’Université d’Aix-en-Provence as well as at the prestigious l’École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he would direct the Centre d’études poétiques from 1999 to 2009. In addition to his scholarly work on modern and contemporary French, Arabic, and American poetry, he would enter the first rank of French poets (or “post-poets,” as is sometimes said), aesthetically affiliated with peers such as Emmanuel Hocquard, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Claude Royet-Journoud. The first full-length translation into English of his writing, Tarnac, a preparatory act, is the most recent volume in a cycle of works published in France by Editions du Seuil’s series Fiction et Cie, created in 1974 by the poet Denis Roche. A seventh volume, titled Le Livre des cabanes, will be published in 2015, also by Seuil. Tarnac, a preparatory act was translated by Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang, and Bonnie Roy and published in January 2014 by Kenning Editions.

Ágnes Lehoczky

Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014), Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters (pamphlet, Boiler House, 2017) and Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017). She was the winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2011. Her collection of essays, Poetry, the Geometry of the Living Substance, was published in 2011. She co-edited Sheffield Anthology (Smith / Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, and recently The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley with Zoë Skoulding (Boiler House, 2018). She is currently co-editing Wretched Strangers, a transnational anthology with J. T. Welsch (out by Boiler House in 2018). She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield where she is co-director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

Polly McCormack

Polly McCormack is a West Yorkshire poet currently in her first year reading English Literature at Sussex. She regularly performs around both London and The North, having been featured at Manchester Fringe Festival, performing for the Northern Beat Poets Society and Soho Poetry Nights. Her work is mostly observational. Her influences include Anne Sexton and Nick Cave. She is currently working on her debut pamphlet.

Eva Poliszczuk

Eva is a passionate, bi-racial graduate whose uni life far from her white home has awoken her to the world of post-colonialism and seasoned food.

Alison Rumfitt

Alison Rumfitt is a transgender poet living and working in Brighton, UK. Her work was nominated twice for the Rhysling Award 2018. Her poetry is citric in taste, best paired with either a vintage red or a glass of port. She writes about LGBT history, the terror of the human body and the guilt of existing but hopefully in a way that’s a bit funny. Find her stream-of-thoughts on Twitter, @gothicgarfield, and see her work in Glass Poetry’s ‘Poets Resist’, Eternal Haunted Summer and more.

Angus Walker

Angus Walker lives in Brighton and has just finished his BA in English Literature at the University of Sussex. His poetry has been published by the student poetry site “The Stanza”.

Jackie Wang

Jackie Wang is a queer poet, essayist, filmmaker, performer, alien, and prison abolitionist. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is pursuing a PhD at Harvard University.

Steven Zultanski

Steven Zultanski is the author of several books of poetry, most recently On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (Information as Material, 2018), Honestly (BookThug, 2018), and Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). He lives in Copenhagen.

The Sussex Poetry Festival Webisite:

https://sussexpofest.wordpress.com/

ACCESSIBILITY:

The Rose Hill is a wheelchair-accessible venue, but unfortunately does not (yet) have wheelchair-accessible toilets. There are, however, accessible toilets yards from the venue, inside The World’s End pub on London Road. The festival will be seated. There is a bar in the venue, and an outside smoking area.

As part of this year’s festival, we will be helping the Rose Hill to raise funds to install wheelchair-accessible toilets so that we can continue to develop our relationship with this wonderful community venue.