DREAM OF EUROPE: SELECTED SEMINARS AND INTERVIEWS: 1984-1992 elucidates Audre Lorde’s methodology as a poet, mentor, and activist during the last decade of her life. This volume compiles a series of seminars, interviews, and conversations held by the author and collaborators across Berlin, Western Europe, and The Caribbean between 1984-1992. These selected writings lay bare struggles, bonds, and hopes shared among Black women in a transnational political context, as well as offering sometimes surprising reflections on the US American counter culture with which Lorde is associated. Many of the poems that were important to Lorde’s development are excerpted in full within these pages, serving as a sort of critical anthology. Edited by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro. Preface by Dagmar Schultz.

Read more and buy it here from Kenning Editions or here from Small Press Distribution.

Or you may enjoy this series of readings to launch and celebrate the book, featuring Rodriguez Castro, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Hanna Girma, Diamond Stingily, Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, Dorothée Munyaneza, Yulan Grant, and Makayla Bailey.

Please consider subscribing to Kenning Editions for a steeply discounted batch of books, including but not limited to Dream of Europe, Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini, Kevin Killian’s Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater, There Three by Devin King, Several Rotations by Jesse Seldess, and The Chilean Flag by Elvira Hernández, translated by Alec Schumacher, and with an introduction by Cecilia Vicuña.

Kevin appeared before me for the first time in 2010 at the Poetry Project celebrating The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. An impossibly entertaining performer, he was like the Zeus of poetry readings and performances. One of the only solo readers who I always felt could “go long” and read for longer than the pre-ordained 20 minutes… And that would be fine. As the reading came to a close, I approached him and asked, “How did you get so good at this?” He said, “Oh, I’m just a ham.” It was at that moment that I knew I would never be as good at Poets Theater as Kevin.

Read “All My Kevins” and also see Stage Fright, Killian’s selected plays.

“Reading this book is to take a master class in writing, in activism, in intersectional identity politics from Lorde herself. Reading this book is to create meaning out of writing, during this time of deep unknowing and sometimes despair.”

[CAS] Circumventing Canons & Methodising archives for critical perspectives from Africa & the Diaspora #CASarchive / Founded by Awa Konaté / goes live this Wednesday at 4:00 PM ( U.K. time) (11:00 AM EST) via Instagram to read from the work of Soleida Ríos. Tune in!

Jasmine Chatfield reviews The Chilean Flag

The interchange of the Flag between object and woman conjures unusual and arresting images: ‘stabbed by matadors’ flags she bleeds in a plastic bag’, a line that sounds almost out of a nursery rhyme, its jauntiness a mockery that serves to underscore the degradation of the country. The Chilean Flag is ‘used as a gag | and that’s why surely that’s why | no one says anything’.

Read more at Modern Poetry in Translation.

There Three collects Devin King’s early collections of poetry, previously published in now scarce, limited editions: CLOPS, These Necrotic Ethos Come the Plains, and The Resonant Space. Devin King is the poetry editor for The Green Lantern Press. His narrative poem, The Grand Complication, was published by Kenning Editions in 2019.

Meanwhile, a subscription to Kenning Editions will get you this new title and all of the others moving forward.

The third installment of “I can explain everything” is up, and it is devoted to Killian’s poetry and poets theater work. Read it all here.

“Is poets theater even a genre at all?” Kevin and David Brazil asked in their introduction to the volume they edited together, 2010’s The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. … Kevin identified himself as part of a second wave of San Francisco Poets Theater because, as he told Heidi Bean, “there was a vacuum into which, I thought, I could harness some New Narrative energy. And gay it up a bit—it was a terribly straight place. Maybe not earnest, but straight.” He cast other writers and the rehearsal process was extremely short, perhaps meeting the day of the show to work out entrances and exits and minimal blocking. Light costuming may have included a robe or Halloween store cloak. His actors held scripts so they didn’t have to memorize their lines, but that meant they weren’t looking at each other. Their performances were varying degrees of amateur, which rather than inducing cringes provided for a vital sense of authenticity.

Attending the AWP conference (March 4-7) this year? Visit the Kenning Editions table (#933) at the book fair. All available titles will be on hand. You can name your own price for any and all books! Signings by Kenning Editions authors, at the table, include Jesse Seldess 10:30-noon and Mayra Rodriguez Castro 1:30-3:00 on Friday the 6th, also Olivia Lott 11:00-12:00 and Devin King 1:00-2:00 on Saturday the 7th.

Also, don’t miss our panel, Disciplinary Poetics: Room 210B, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Friday, March 6, 10:35-11:50. Moderated by Patrick Durgin, with papers by Tyrone Williams, Jennifer Nelson, Devin King, and Marty Larson-Xu.

This critical panel examines a few ways poetry intervenes and enhances—provides alternative models of research to—disciplines that constitute literature’s “outside.” This is a metacorrective to the once astounding but now flaccid notions of interdisciplinarity and genre hybridity. How do the disciplinary logics of biology, information science, philosophy, political economy, anthropology, history, geography, journalism, classics, visual arts, etc. react to a poetic working over?

We are also co-hosting a big off-site reading.

ACTION BOOKS, GREEN LANTERN PRESS, KENNING EDITIONS, and SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION invite you to an OFF-SITE READING by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar / Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro (reading Audre Lorde) / Joel Craig / Rachel Galvin / Katherine Hedeen (reading Legna Rodríguez Iglesias) / Cathy Park Hong (reading Seungja Choi) / Valerie Hsiung / Devin King / Olivia Lott (reading Soleida Ríos) / John Pluecker / Lara Schoorl / Jesse Seldess / Candice Wuehle at the Cherrity Bar, 302 Montana St, San Antonio, a two minute walk from the convention center / Cherrity Bar’s proceeds go entirely to worthy community non-profits / best Ramen and craft cocktails in San Antonio / admission is free / starts at 7:00 PM, Friday March 6

It’s a “ModPo Minute” or nine of them, in which two great readers of contemporary poetry delve into Craig Dworkin’s The Pine-Woods Notebook.

Watch here.

Over at Full Stop, an insightful review of The Dirty Text, by Soleida Ríos.

With reality itself at stake, Ríos’ materialization of dreams in literature is not mere narcissistic auto-analysis. Opposed to petrified, insomniac ideologies that prove increasingly inadequate to the task of averting societal implosion, dreams liquify the strictures of consciousness to yield the raw material of fresh understanding. That material must be recognized and refined, cooked into language, for understanding to develop far enough to reflect back into dreams and charge them with new material to reshape.

La editorial de Chicago Kenning Editions publicó una antología de la poeta y periodista venezolana que ha tenido un éxito inesperado. Faride Mereb, a cargo de la selección junto con Elisa Maggi, cuenta la historia de este libro…

…dice Miyó Vestrini: “Cada generación traduce de nuevo, y de nuevo, incansablemente, aportando sombrías o risueñas desmitificaciones. El texto llevado a contrapelo, se alborota, se aquieta, se enfurece y regresa siempre, lleno de otro con-texto”.

Read it here.

Patrick Durgin, author of PQRS, is reading with Alex Karsavin and Kristiana Rae Colón as part of their Open Door Series Tuesday, January 21, 2020, 7:00 PM. The event is free and ADA accessible. Details can be found here.