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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.

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

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.

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