Miyó Vestrini, « la Sylvia Plath vénézuélienne ».  Pour célébrer la sortie de l’anthologie Grenade dans la bouche, traduite en langue française par Clara Briceño Zappacosta, publié par le formidable extrême contemporain, une lecture à l’EXC Librairie, Passage Molière, 75003 Paris. 19h le samedi 29 juin. Avec Patrick Durgin (traducteur de French Unpublished Poems & Facsimile, Kenning Editions & Letra Muerta) et Clara Briceño Zappacosta. Lectures en français, anglais, et espagnol. 

Miyó Vestrini, “…if she is a Plath, we think she is one who would have set Ted Hughes on fire.” Vestrini’s selected poems, Grenade in Mouth, translated into English by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig, was published by Kenning Editions and Letra Muerta in 2019, then later Patrick Durgin’s English translations of Vestrini’s early poems originally written in French. To celebrate the release of the French language collection of Vestrini’s work, translated by Clara Briceño Zappacosta, a reading in three languages. At EXC Librairie, Passage Molière, 75003 Paris, 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 29th.   

Glimmerings and Constellations: Creative and Critical Responses

Selected Plays of Jay Wright, Volume Three / edited by Will Daddario

The lauded poet Jay Wright is known for weaving global cosmologies into taut, rhythmically dynamic verses that double as poetic and philosophical treatises. Having recently published two volumes of his selected plays, composed over several decades, in this volume, nine leading voices in contemporary US poetry, performance making, and performance theory, offer insights into Wright’s theatre. Intended for scholars and theatre-makers alike, these contributions act as points of entry into Wright’s theatre-thinking and add to the growing discourse around Wright’s work that sees in this artistic figure one of America’s most exciting intellects. The creative and critical responses to Wright’s work include essays and other texts by Will Daddario, Matthew Goulish, Devin King, David Grubbs, Michael Paul Berlin, Esteban Rodríguez, Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Daniel Woody, and Duriel E. Harris.

Click through to order from Kenning Editions, or visit Small Press Distribution to do the same.

Now available as a free download is Mark Nowak’s abecederian prose poem WINTER, documenting the attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read more and download the chapbook here. And tune in this evening for a reading and conversation between Nowak and Bill Ayers, presented by the formidable Pilsen Community Books. This is a free, virtual event.

And if you happen to be in New York next next week, you can attend the in-person launch even for WINTER, Friday, January 12, at the Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, NY, with Nowak and Stacy Szymaszek: details are here.

Coming soon from Kenning Editions is WINTER, by Mark Nowak, who launches this free, digital chapbook with in-person and virtual events. Get these in your calendar!

Saturday, January 6, Pilsen Community Books hosts a virtual reading and discussion with Nowak and Bill Ayers: read more here.

Friday, January 12, at the Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, NY, Nowak and Stacy Szymaszek: details are here.

“Winter,” an abecedarian poem from Mark Nowak’s forthcoming book, …AGAIN,  documents the attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These innovative and trenchant prose poems expand the long traditions of documentary poetry and social poetics through the structure of the English alphabet, letter by letter. Nowak compiles, splices, and reshapes Trump’s Twitter archive and excerpts from his January 6th speech at the Save America March, notes taken while watching hours of livestream videos, Google maps, bird guides, figures from Greek mythology, newspaper reports, “fake news,” and more to critique the alt-right’s attempt to overturn the U.S. election.

Winter is offered as a free PDF download formatted to read on screen or to print, fold, bind, and circulate, in the great tradition of artistic and political pamphleteering. Issued on January 6, 2024 by Kenning Editions in chapbook format to mark the anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Winter will remain available until it resurfaces in the larger collection to be published by Coffee House Press.

Mark Nowak is a poet, social critic, and labor activist whose books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, and Social Poetics. He edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is the founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.workerwriters.org).

Gabriel Kruis on Zeroes Were Hollow, David Larsen’s second (bigger) book of poetry, culled from this thoughtful review via The Poetry Project Newsletter.

[A] love of error and good trouble, of troubling received logic, of indulgence in “imperfection,” marks every inch of Zeroes Were Hollow.

Take, for instance, the handwritten poem in various colored inks on the back cover: its penultimate line is X’d-out and there’s an inscrutable scribble tying it off (I think it spells NAVE?). The acknowledgements and the TOC, too, are scrawled in the author’s hand, as are several poems throughout. You don’t have to have read Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero to appreciate the immediacy and corporeality of the handwriting, especially when it renders the formerly “neutral,” totally serviceable typeface, null; the poet’s anarchic wit is as evident in every looping O and squiggled N as it is in every poem in the book.

Music Instead of Emotion: A Rail reading by David Larsen and Tenaya Nasser-Frederick

Register here. And pick up Zeroes Were Hollow and Syrup Hits (a few remain!).

David Larsen is a US poet and translator, and the author of Zeroes Were Hollow (Kenning Editions, 2022). His open notebook of unpublished translations is viewable online. Currently, he is a research fellow at the Library of Arabic Literature in Abu Dhabi, where he is editing the poems of Jamil Buthaynah.

Tenaya Nasser-Frederick is the author of two chapbooks, Penumbra Highway (Gas Meter, 2018) and Lavender Cats (1080 press, 2020). Poems have appeared in the _Brooklyn Rail, Castle Greyskull, the Brooklyn Review, and EBB.

Every in print paperback book ever published by Kenning Editions is half off here at Kenningeditions.com this week, August 14 through 19. Stock up. These are built to be read and cherished. And heaven knows you do not have them all, yet. Domestic shipping is free. International shipping is reasonable.

Bomb has published a short conversation between two of our favorite contemporary writers: Charlie Markbreiter and Ben Fama. Charlie’s Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella can be had here.

“I want poetry to be detonated like a bomb!”

Read why, and how, right here.

Full-Stop is featuring a two part interview with poet, translator, visual artist, and scholar David Larsen, author of Zeroes Were Hollow and Syrup Hits.

I am afraid of lots of things, but not the Light Bringer.

I’ve wanted to have a stoop sale, but it’s never seemed feasible. So I’m just running another mailorder discount blitz, this time featuring a batch of books by Latin-American women, in translation (all but one including the original Spanish en face). These books are half off now through the 9th:

The Chilean Flag

The Dirty Text

Grenade in Mouth

titulo/title

Juana I