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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.

Books. Five dollars. This weekend. Juana I, The Compleat Purge, Ambient Parking Lot, Propagation, Left Having, Some Math, and Hannah Weiner’s Open House. Just because it’s summer.

Small Press Distribution celebrates Earth Month with an April-long sale on books that are all about such matters, including Francis Ponge’s Partisan of Things. Visit their Whales Bash Back sale here.

Andrew Durbin’s debut novel MacArthur Park is being touted over at Pitchfork, replete with an excellent interview with Andrew by Kevin Lozano. This debut actually debuted as a chapbook in the Ordinance series, and you can read it in PDF form here. “Ordinance” as in coordination, ordinal points, and incendiary potential. Each chapbook in the series was handmade, perfect bound, and portable. And though Andrew’s Ordinance book is out of print, other titles are still available (while supplies last!) by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Cassandra Troyan, Daniel Spangler, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, Carla Harryman and Brandon Brown. Do you want to read MacArthur Park in its entirety? Of course you do! Nightboat Books is your host.

As the final entry in his series of Jacket2 commentaries about “how poems change,” Piotr Gwiazda discusses how Carla Harryman’s Artifact of Hope “turns philosophy into poetry.” Here is the insightful article and here is your chance to complete your collection of Ordinance series chapbooks with one of the last remaining copies.

Artifact of Hope is the final installment of the Ordinance series of non-fiction writing in the areas of contemporary poetics, philosophy, politics, and technology. “Ordinance” as in coordination, ordinal points, and incendiary potential. Each chapbook in the series is handmade, perfect bound, and portable. Other titles are by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Cassandra Troyan, Daniel Spangler, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, Andrew Durbin and Brandon Brown.

Announcing the last iteration of the third annual Festival of Poets Theater, a radio play by Alain Jugnon:

Artaud in Amerika, a radio play by Alain Jugnon, translated by Nathanaël, directed by Patrick Durgin, produced by Mark Booth, and voiced by Booth, Durgin, Caroline McCraw, Joel Craig, Devin King, Jeremy Biles and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar. Commissioned by and produced for the third annual Festival of Poets Theater.

this is

a quick caption for Artaud in Amerika

because Artaud lives in it

I know that Trump did not know that my poet Artaud had hosted your Welles in France in 1948 out of love for Rita

but Artaud lives in it

the piece is called Artaud in Amerika

where you are not

there are Artaud and Welles who redraw the world in red

life in beauty

dreams in american

without Trumperie

with poetry

the cinema

and writing

Artaud in Amerika is Artaud who tweets to Trump:

leave the stage, we are the theater

Kenning Editions is pleased to announce the publication of the debut full-length publication by the celebrated Argentinian poet Ana Arzoumanian, fully bilingual, translated by Gabriel Amor and edited by Daniel Borzutzky: Juana I.

This book opens with a blank page containing a line that is repeated like a mantra throughout the text: “What I need is a mouth.” As if the mouth, absent from the body, had lost its capacity to speak. Yet the text emits many voices, imagining the circumstances that surrounded the figure of Juana the Mad, the legitimate Queen of Spain in the first half of the XVI century, who was declared insane then silenced and confined to a convent.

Ana Arzoumanian subsumes us in a dense and powerful atmosphere in which the liberated mouth unveils with an abject heroism that could be called feminine, the tensions that historical circumstances impose over bodies.

Gabriel Amor’s translation, developed over the course of a decade, registers the rhythms and tones of this beautifully carved tragedy with unmatched skill.

Lila Zemborain

Juana was born in Toledo in 1479. She was the titular Queen of Castile from 1504 (when her mother, Isabella the Catholic, died) until her own death in 1555. Judged insane by history, and placed under house arrest in Tordesillas for over forty years, Juana was the object of political machinations designed to deprive her of power. Her mental health became the focus of a struggle between her father, Ferdinand the Catholic, and her husband, Philip the Fair, over the right to rule her kingdom. With the sudden death of her young husband, a new crisis unfolded in Juana’s life . . . one that was marked by an eight-month funereal procession through Castile (during which she refused to bury his corpse). This is the jumping off point for Ana Arzoumanian’s piece, a poetic lens through which we witness a marked development in Juana’s language. The first-person narration becomes lost amid whispers; it is an “I” that, even as it is deprived of its content, continues to insist on its need to speak. Although judged and condemned by her peers, the question of Juana in Arzoumanian’s poem consists of a series of moments where history and the world interweave, and a new language is born along the way. The ideological leaders of Juana’s time were reacting to the monarchy’s expansionistic politics: the discovery of America, the first circumnavigation of the world, the decrees expelling the Jews in 1492 and the Moors in 1501. Juana I is a love poem that deals with a beloved’s body as an object on the margins of the legal body; it is a tapestry-poem that exposes the reader to the bare emotions of a story about domination and cruelty. The poem works at the deepest levels of language, articulating the speech of Castile and its legal echoes as taken from The Seven-Part Code of Laws, a juridical code that unified the Kingdom with South America via the Castilian language.

Juana’s narrative blurs fact and imagination, as she conflates past with present, brother with father and husband, and marriage bed with childhood bathtub and royal coffin. This leaves us to wonder, was Juana truly la loca, or was her mental state the consequence of incredible personal loss, abuse and trauma? Or, were the accusations of madness merely a ploy to suppress her voice? In her own time, the courts judged against Juana and sentenced her to confinement for over forty years. Five centuries later, Arzoumanian’s powerful verse and provocative imagery is another sort of justice, one that gives a mouth to the silenced.

Ana Arzoumanian is a prolific and celebrated poet, but is or has also been known as: 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. And as an active member of the first course of arbitration in Argentina, dictated by the National Direction of Training and Communication of the Ministry of Justice of the Nation in 1992, she was selected advisor in the Ministry of Justice of the Nation. Arzoumainian remains an active literary and theatre critic, and has traveled extensively to read her own poetry, as well as to collaborate on the documentary A Dialogue Without Borders on the Armenian genocide and the disappeared under the Argentine military dictatorship. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, Juana I was adapted for the stage by Román Caracciolo, as La que necesita una boca. This book is the first full-length English language translation of her work to be published in North America.

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.  Gabriel 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 currently Program Director of Postbaccalaureate Studies at Columbia University.

Distributed by Small Press Distribution and also available via subscription.
Poetry  /  Bilingual  /  ISBN: 9780999719800  /  $14.95  /

Subscribe to Kenning Editions and receive all books in our 2018-2019 season, including Ana Arzoumanian’s Juana I, Soleida Ríos’ The Dirty Text, Selected poems by Miyó Vestrini, and Kevin Killian’s Stage Fright: Selected Plays.

Here is the link. It’s easy and it eases the way for important new and archival publications like these. Onward to a radically different, new year!

The third annual Festival of Poets Theater’s online offerings are live at https://festivalofpoetstheater.com/2017/12/10/poets-theater-online/ for one week. Stay tuned for the debut of Alain Jugnon’s ARTAUD IN AMERIKA this xmas eve, also at festivalofpoetstheater.com Artist bios are here.

• Unscripted, unrehearsed, and unedited, NOW is a three-part improvisational work created for the Third Annual Festival of Poets Theater by Suzanne Stein and Steve Benson. Bridging, exploding, and reinforcing the dialectical tension and chaos underlying the dichotomy of practice and performance, NOW attempts to examine, understand, and simultaneously realize its own nature during the course of this half-hour-long documentation-as-product.

• Douglas Kearney presents Sucktion. An abject housewife undergoes a cyber-erotic transformation through the subversive use of a vacuum cleaner. That’s Sucktion, a hyperopera composed by Anne LeBaron with a libretto by Douglas Kearney (published in Someone Took They Tongues. [Subito, 2016]). This performance, directed by Nataki Garrett, features the trio, SoNu (Nina Eidsheim, vocalist; Phil Curtis, laptop/sound design; Gustavo Aguilar, percussion), and was recorded at REDCAT in Los Angeles (2008).

• Annie Dorsen presents Youtube 1-4, a set of music videos made from pop songs and youtube comments.

• Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), a radio play embodying the “theater of cruelty.”

• [Online December 24th, 2017] Patrick Durgin directs Alain Jugnon’s radio play Artaud in Amerika, translated from the French by Nathanaël and derived on commission of the festival from the book. Recorded, edited and scored by Mark Booth, voices are by Booth, Durgin, Jeremy Biles, Caroline McCraw, Joel Craig, Devin King, and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar.

this is

a quick caption for Artaud in Amerika

because Artaud lives in it

I know that Trump did not know that my poet Artaud had hosted your Welles in France in 1948 out of love for Rita

but Artaud lives in it

the piece is called Artaud in Amerika

where you are not

there are Artaud and Welles who redraw the world in red

life in beauty

dreams in american

without Trumperie

with poetry

the cinema

and writing

Artaud in Amerika is Artaud who tweets to Trump:

leave the stage, we are the theater