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For no good reason, other than they are great, we’re offering all three books by Jesse Seldess and Devin King on sale for half price this week. Here’s a good reason, actually. Two of my favorite aspects of their poems are repetition and narrative. And, well, those are two incongruent aspects of poetry that each masterfully reconciles. Look here:

Who Opens

Left Having

Several Rotations

The Grand Complication

There Three

Gathering

Buy them all! Read them all! It’s summer, why not?

It’s May Day. Celebrate with a big long narrative poem called Gathering. It’s Devin King’s continuing saga, and this installment begins at a dinner party in Chicago and ends in a utopia populated by storytelling ants. In between is a choral künstlerroman, a series of intertwined, poetic monologues that explore how the single narrator of existential and auto-fiction might be broadened to two, three, or even four narrators. Follow along here.

P&T Knitwear is pleased to welcome Charlie Markbreiter to celebrate his first book, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, with a talk, audience Q&A, and book signing. Interlaced with essays on transsexuality, clones, dissociating, American Apparel, and affect theorist Lauren Berlant, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is a parasocial eulogy for the aughts. “It’s some kind of auto(fan)fiction” that “uses the conventions of fanfiction as a dissociated way of writing about trans-ness,” as well as “social media, its effects on language, on style, on love, on attachment, on intellectual and emotional labor, on whatever the ruling class has become in this century. XOXO.” (McKenzie Wark, author of Raving)

Charlie will be joined in conversation by James Factora, staff writer at them. After the talk, Charlie will sign copies of his book. XOXO.

RSVP here.

Trisha Low has won a Creative Capital grant for her current project, entitled Fated. Low’s The Compleat Purge was published by Kenning Editions in 2013. It’s a period piece. You should read it.

The Times Literary Supplement has published Alexandra Reza’s gleaming discussion of Nathalie Quintane’s work, with a focus on Tomatoes and Marty Hiatt’s heroic work translating and contextualizing that book. Read the piece here.

We are pleased as punch to announce the publication of David Larsen’s second book of poetry, Zeroes Were Hollow, along with a limited, facsimile edition of his 2005 chapbook Syrup Hits.

There is a tradition of cerebral scholar-poets in which David Larsen is hard to place. As a translator, he performs sensitive work that preserves the alterity of medieval Arabic poetry without stooping to exoticism or hermetic dodges. His original poetry is an unconventional counterpart to this practice. It is profane, musical, and, as announced on the cover of Larsen’s 2005 debut The Thorn, “easy to read.” That book was archly described by Kevin Killian as “a book of anger, the fury that sweeps through the plain, the Abolitionist anger that made John Brown steal that ferry.” Seventeen years later comes Zeroes Were Hollow, a second book of poetry suffused with the wit of the gallows. “I was pleased as punch to let it lie,” says the first poem, “but then the bug bit me,” and indeed the book crawls with pests and vermin. By definition these are animals out of place, and ever-present familiars to the poet of Zeroes Were Hollow. Amid the laughter, it is a solemn revolt against nihilism, and a monument to civic animus and loss of life whose marble is still warm to the touch.

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In 2005, Kenning published Syrup Hits, a pseudonymous chapbook-length collage billed as the “remix” of David Larsen’s first book of poetry. In Syrup Hits, the satirical undercurrent of The Thorn was channeled into a 32-page torrent on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as filtered through slowed-down soundscapes of southern-US hip hop and the San Francisco Bay Area tradition of psychedelic protest art. Now, to accompany Zeroes Were Hollow, we are pleased to rerelease Syrup Hits in a limited, facsimile edition. “Amazing. Some of the best use of collage I’ve ever seen, and my favorite handwriting since Whalen.” — Gary Sullivan

Syrup Hits originally appeared in 2005 with endpapers block-printed and hand-tinted by the artist. This edition: reproduction, riso, hand painting, binding and image processing by Kelli Anderson, Oriana Nuzzi, and Faride Mereb.

Another in our collaborations with Letra Muerta, Hanni Ossott’s unpublished, early poems, written in Greece, is volume two in the Latin American and Caribbean Women in Poetry series. A strictly limited edition, now available here

Born February 14, 1946 in Caracas, Hanni Ossott studied at and joined the faculty in Literature of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, focusing on German literature and philosophy: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Rilke. In 1979, Ossott went to Greece to study Plato and Heraclitus at the University of Athens. There she wrote the poems that would appear in her 1983 volume Hasta que llegue el dia y huyan las sombras, as well as the previously unpublished poems presented in this chapbook. Ossott would go on to publish five additional volumes of poetry. She also was awarded the José Antonio Ramos Sucre Prize and the Lazo Martí Prize, and worked as a translator and a critic.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022, 8:00 pm at the Poetry Project, David Larsen reads with Will Alexander! Larsen’s Zeroes Were Hollow + a reprint of Syrup Hits are both coming out the middle of December. You can snag a copy of each at the reading. If you cannot attend in person, know that it will live stream on the Poetry Project’s Youtube channel.

Book Launch: Staged Reading and Music
Saturday, November 12, 4 pm
Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery

2156 West Fulton St., Chicago, IL

Please join Every house has a door for a staged reading of the first ten pages of the play Passage from Selected Plays of Jay Wright Volume I: The Dramatic Radiance of Number, directed by Lin Hixson, featuring performers Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Kenya Fulton, Matthew Goulish, and Jenny Polus. A live musical set for solo saxophone by Nick Mazzarella will follow the reading.

This two-volume set, the first such collection of this esteemed poet’s writing for the theater, offers an expansive look into an under-explored area of the his body of work, spanning over four decades, from the early 1970s to 2015. Those who know Wright’s poetry will find familiar rhythms and figures. New to the scene, however, is the mobilization of polysemy, quantum entanglement, and global-American identities within theatrical form. Arriving amid a pandemic, however, when the face of theatre has been forced to change in order to comport itself to new restrictions on liveness, these texts seem to challenge us to find other ways to perform, to tell stories, to grow together. Moving between Vermont, the Sandia Mountains, unnamed rivers, San Pedro, an urban square, Boca Negra, Mesa City, and numerous liminal spaces of ritual and incantation, these plays, selected by Jay and Lois Wright, showcase quotidian terrestrial affairs spliced with spiritual ascendency.

Today is the day Charlie Markbreiter’s Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is published. You should be able to visit your local bookseller and acquire your very own copy. If it’s not in stock, perturb said local, independent bookseller. You can also search for the ebook on your favorite platform (ISBN 979-8-9856628-0-1 9.99 suggested retail price). The print edition can be found here or here.

“Hey, Upper East Siders. Gossip Girl here. And I have the biggest news ever.” Every episode starts like this. We’re Upper East Siders; Gossip Girl tells us we are. But also, we aren’t and never will be. All we can do is look inside. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella follows Gossip Girl, an anonymous blog, and the prep school students she reports on, who snitch on each other for likes. They include: Nate, beautiful transgender himbo, Bernie Madoff’s son; Serena (It Girl); Dan (vengeful alt nerd). Meanwhile, in the year 2030, Gordon (former TV protege) starts writing for Gossip Girl 3: the Reboot. Will he self-sabotage? Or…? Gossip Girl began as a YA book series; it was first published in 2002, one year into America’s War on Terror. Soon adapted for TV, Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network in 2007, swerving through the Financial Crash, and ending in 2012, midway through the Obama years. Interlaced with essays on transsexuality, clones, dissociating, American Apparel, and affect theorist Lauren Berlant, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is a parasocial eulogy for the aughts.

With illustrations by River L. Ramirez

Charlie Markbreiter’s writing has been published in venues such as Bookforum, Art in America, and The New Inquiry, where he serves as the Managing Editor. A PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is also a mod of the Death Panel Discord, a free school/health justice forum. He is not a Gossip Girl character, or that’s what you think. He lives in New York. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is his first book.

Charlie will launch the book with two New York City readings:

Brooklyn: Saturday, November 12, 2022

Wendy’s Subway (check site or socials for details TBD)

Queens: Thursday, November 17, 2022

Topos Bookstore (check site or socials for details TBD)

Figurations and Dedications

Selected Plays of Jay Wright, Volume 2

Co-published with Every house has a door

ISBN: 978-1-7343176-9-5 / Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950378 / 464 pp. / $20.00

Order your copy here or through Small Press Distribution.

Jay Wright is a poet’s poet; identified by poet Dante Micheaux as one of the best American poets—because “his poetry represents everything that America is and…not what he would like it to be.” Wright’s plays offer readers, performers, theatre makers, and scholars an expansive look into an under-explored area of the poet’s body of work, spanning over four decades, from the early 1970’s to 2015. Those who know Wright’s poetry will find familiar rhythms and figures. New to the scene, however, is the mobilization of polysemy, quantum entanglement, and global-American identities within theatrical form. Moving between Vermont, the Sandia Mountains, unnamed rivers, San Pedro, an urban square, Boca Negra, Mesa City, and numerous liminal spaces of ritual and incantation, these plays, selected by Jay and Lois Wright, showcase quotidian terrestrial affairs spliced with spiritual ascendency. Those who pick up these plays will find themselves involved in everything.

In Volume Two: The Crossing, Daughters of the Water, Homage to Anthony Braxton, The Crossing of the Second River, The Delights of Memory, The Disappearance of Mexico, The Possible Impossibility of Leaving Home.

Join us on Saturday November 12, 4:00 p.m. as we launch the two volumes of Jay Wright’s selected plays at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2156 West Fulton Street in Chicago. Every house has a door presents a staged reading of the first ten pages of the play Passage from Selected Plays of Jay Wright Volume: The Dramatic Radiance of Number, directed by Lin Hixson, featuring performers Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Kenya Fulton, Matthew Goulish, and Jenny Polus. A live musical set for solo saxophone by Nick Mazzarella will follow the reading.

Saturday, October 22, 2022
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Logan Square Comfort Station
Free

Chicago indie literature!

Kenning Editions and Meekling Press present Charlie Markbreiter, reading from his debut Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, along with poet Chad Morgan, novelist Anne Yoder, and film and video game critic Sam Bodrojan.

Charlie Markbreiter’s writing has been published in venues such as Bookforum, Art in America, and The New Inquiry, where he serves as the Managing Editor. A PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is also a mod of the Death Panel Discord, a free school/health justice forum. He is not a Gossip Girl character, or that’s what you think. He lives in New York. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is his first book.

Chad Morgan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. He writes the newsletter disposition.substack.com and can be found on Twitter (@grabtheglitter) and Instagram (@theechadmorgan).

Anne K. Yoder is the author of the novel, The Enhancers, forthcoming from Meekling Press in fall 2022. Her stories and essays have appeared in Fence, New York Tyrant, Tin House, and Make Lit, among other publications.

Sam Bodrojan is a film and video game critic who has written for Filmmaker Mag, Reverse Shot, Little White Lies, and Metrograph, among others. She is big on Tik Tok, beat Elden Ring, and currently lives in Chicago.

We hope to see you there!