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SUSURROS A MI PADRE represents Erick Sáenz''s efforts to connect language and culture, family and loss. The book charts the author''s fractured relationship with his father: a man whose Mexican blood he inherited. Sáenz collages memories, first-hand accounts, and interviews related to his Latinx identity in an effort to resurrect the culture that alludes him. From Los Angeles to San Jose, this is his journey to redefine himself."Susurros como vientos del Mar: Sáenz''s SUSURROS A MI PADRE, is a glowing debut. These poems shine with a quartzite clarity that guides the reader through vital fronteras of Latinx experience. Weaving together a polyvocal lyric of familial inquiry, Sáenz''s poetry is a refreshing, reinvigorating looking at a Latinx narrative that so many live, and yet so few ever read about. May this Poet''s ocean of language change that tide."-Angel Dominguez"Let this book show you an interrogation and migration of story, where story is made of secrets: from Monterrey to Los Angeles to San José and back; through wanting to know one''s father, and ultimately, oneself. In this candid, real-time narrative, Erick Sáenz sits with the discomfort and mystery of words in Spanish and English that [pass time], where time is a summation of moments, questions, memories; and where passing is actively standing watch at a life that''s yours. Call it disenfranchised grief-or listen when he asks, ''What is it like growing up landlocked?''-or when he affects, ''Este es mi elogia, papi'' with the crushing beauty of a confession. Sáenz writes fatherlessness, restlessness, and distance and othering as double consciousness. This story is a slow, heartfelt corrido unveiling the poetics of loss."-Janice Sapigao"At birth, the left hemisphere of our brains registers the difference between speech and noise. Even before an infant begins to babble, the brain has built a map for language. We know this because of brain-imaging, which, in some cases, illuminates the firing of synapses by placing them on a topographic plane. When reading Sáenz''s text, my experience is akin to being on this plane, where the electrical eruptions are both beautiful and violent, but invited and significant. I experience linguistic ruptures. And while I am asked to return to past memories, to photographs, voices recollected, all the while negotiating a narrative that won''t be easily pieced back together, I see the importance of a text such as this as an utterance I both need and recognize. Needless to say, this text is incredible."-Lisa Donovan-Catharsis and Cultural Memory: an OS conversation with Erick Sáenz, author of ''Susurros a Mi Padre''

"BORN AGAIN is an ecstatic disquisition on the psychic, sensual and cerebral power of religious experience. In a crucible of direct encounter with the Holy Spirit, towering and oppressive mental structures are deranged and reshaped into a dynamic feminist recourse of audacious openings: borderless, raw and alive. Instead of shaming the male god figurehead these lyrics twist in vertiginous funnels disarming power empathically, a rebellious performance that proliferates like quicksilver in a revelatory field of creative fire. Libidinal improvisatory anti-edict, anti-threshold terrestrial tangibility. Expressing volatile, febrile and point blank composure Ivy Johnson redefines (fathoms) what it means to be enthralled as she unburdens the epic weight of judgment and spiritual peril in a veil of viscose corporeality. The erotics of immanence are emancipatory and miraculous here, now."--Brenda Iijima"BORN AGAIN is a book about the redemptive power of the singular voice, arising from the mixture of a multitude of voices, coming together as a single flame to light the way through a landscape of sorrow, evil, extreme beauty, and extreme feeling. The book teeters between definitions of poetry and the essay form to come upon the right way to say the unsayable, telling us things like: ''I am nothing like a tree / You think I''m in a drought / You think I''m shriveling up / You are wrong.'' Ivy Johnson is a poet who believes that the I and the spirit are intertwined forever in the act of the poem. She gives the poets of today and tomorrow the permission to gain strength from the force of the persona, with its ability to surround trauma and alchemize it into the sort of language that sustains. Johnson tells us: ''I am free I am free / Believe me I am.'' And we do believe she is free. And we believe, in her poems, we are, too."--Dorothea Lasky"Are you ''more Medea than Oedipus''? Are you Jesus? Have you arrived to Ivy Johnson''s poetry to experience the revisitation of rape or an abstract ''ecological armageddon'' of language or the orifice of a poetic body? Here, we become her wakeful marigolds. We sit across from her like pages of membranes, trying to eat as fast as we can off the hypnotic fluency of her literary fingers, twisting and turning with her as we unlock the ''locomotion of a tautology,'' the constant lips and thighs and gurgles or shareholders of her text. And we don''t die happily."--Vi Khi Nao------"Slipperiness and Simultaneous Revolt": an OS conversation with Ivy Johnson, author of ''Born Again''

INSTITUTION IS A VERB is a compendium of community-contributed texts, scores, notes, and documentation culminating and indexing 7 years of collaboration, para-capitalist research, and performative institution during Panoply Performance Laboratory's operations as a laboratory site at 104 Meserole Street in Brooklyn, NY. Gathering texts, documentation, scores, notes, and recollections from the community of performance makers, witnesses, and others who actualized PPL's operation as a lab site at 104 Meserole Street 2012-2018, this project echoes, recognizes, and critically reflects upon (p)articular performances, forms of gathering, collective ideation procedures, and (for)bearances of witness practiced across the site, its situations, and multiplicit envisaging processes. To presence, to difference, to practical, performative resilience, descriptions of what was seen, how some felt, what one did and why are dedicated in documentary formats. In context, for history, in substantiation of the value of each other, PPL (in lab iteration) culminates 7 years of collaboration, para-capitalist research, and performative institution (institution as a verb).

Daughter Isotope is a book of "hybrid" poems that speaks to multiple iterations of "daughter" tropes across generations, national borders, and timescales. Central to the question of the Daughter Isotope is: What is a collective archive? within a global, disparate, migrant cultural space. DI is organized in a series of four "clouds," calling up the vague, penetrable borders of our digital lives, both searching and searchable.Throughout the manuscript, the poems operate as types of search engines that test the boundaries of often overlapping archives or "clouds" that make up diasporic experience. Starting with a series of poems based on the Mahabharata, an "encyclopedic" Sanskrit epic-cloud about an apocalyptic war composed over centuries, the organization of the manuscript is based off of South Asian polyvocal storytelling traditions. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg, a "daughter" gender could be seen as any "child" or subject under a rigid paternal order - whether Hindu nationalism or U.S. exceptionalism - whose filiation is in question. Dispersed through the manuscript are multiple versions/clouds of Draupadi, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Krishna, Michael Jackson, and the aspirational figure of @agirl, among others uncertain "daughters." Poems interrogate the stability of various "daughter" genders through myth, online personas, computer gaming, nuclear physics, and artificial intelligence.

ACID WESTERN is a mutagenic contemporary anti-western. The poems in this collection can be seen as dispatches from the architectures of the terrain of the hyperobjects one finds themselves inside of in the 21st century, in which the social and political structures moved through on a daily basis are occurring (scaling, nesting + accumulation, incompletion, ephemerality, and oscillation are recurring features of the collection). Time and space are also important features of these poems, both thematically, as well as formally in their composition. The notes that became the poems were written over a period of time, and arranged into the sequences here. The idea is to capture a sense of the time, space, distance, multiplicity, and complexity of the daily mundane; intersecting, looping, reiterating through this and these spaces within large and varied timescapes, in an effort to describe a sense of scale and an unfolding of interconnected events and entities, within the contemporary reverberations of violent foundational mythologies, culminating with a direct entreaty in an effort to dissolve the atomization of the enmeshed collective.ACID WESTERN doggedly confronts the contemporary malaise we try (and fail) to ignore more and more every day: what to do with the mess of data and busted language that skitters through the air around us, or, as Balun heartbreakingly calls it in a deictic gesture for the ages, "all this this." By doing some top-notch demolition work and stripping his lines down to their essences, Balun likewise builds these caring, weightless lyric poems that course through their negative space rather than overcrowd or shout through the page. What do we do with our malaise in Robert''s poems? We wake up, we look for traps, we course through the mess by listening. You ever wake up on a weekend next to someone you love? This crusher of a debut feels like that. There''s hope in that feeling, along with life, along with the unknowable. In poem after poem after poem, I kept thanking Robert Balun for creating this world in which the phones are off, the streams haven''t yet begun, the banners haven''t come to cover us, and the sun is still steeping up in the sky. - Danniel Schoonebeek

"Poetry is rightly destroyed and rebuilt in the abrasive caress of we whose claims upon the human, having constantly been denied by man, put the human to the test. It''s still held by many to be a scientific fact that the humanities are not for us. At the same time, surrounding that dimensionless enclosure, whose inside and outside we refuse, we are the humanities, that fleshly mechanics, and LOVE, ROBOT is a missive from that ongoing refusal. ''I know it hurts. But/code fails'' so beautifully in Margaret Rhee''s hand and ear. ''The world was not made for love,'' she says. So let''s follow her on out of it. -Fred Moten "The poems of LOVE, ROBOT are delicate and smooth, witty and touching, and yes, occasionally odd and strange, as human beings themselves are. In a paradoxical and wonderful way, Margaret Rhee''s robot love affairs make us rethink what it might mean to be human." -Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer "Margaret Rhee''s LOVE, ROBOT is a gorgeous, brainy collection of poems about erotic connections between humans and machines and the impossibility of disentangling the one from the other. Love machines thrum through these poems, all lit up with desire and electric light, showing ''how to make a circuit.'' LOVE, ROBOT resonates with works of great science fiction such as Philip K. Dick''s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ted Chiang''s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and Marge Piercy''s He, She, and It, but offers something different, rare, and beautiful in its piercing lyricism and keen, surprising pleasures." -Shelley Streeby author of Radical Sensations and the Director of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop "....As Rhee writes: ''I loved you but/you could not make us beautiful./ I loved you because you could make beautiful things/that I never got to keep.'' This way of calling out to a beloved, with whom a reciprocal feeling or encounter is never certain, reminded me - not in its form, but in its feeling - of the Mira Bai''s bhajans. Has Margaret Rhee written the world''s first cyberbhajan? ''[S]ay, robot,'' the book ends: ''murmur to me, it is the middle of the night./....we all deserve a song that is untranslatable''. How beautiful, how ultra-real: I found this sentiment, this voltage, this unspeakable song: to be." -Bhanu Kapil∩╗┐A collection of love poetry that undercuts and reassembles narratives, LOVE, ROBOT is an experimental text that humanizes our relationship with technology. Through liaisons between humans and machines in a science fictional world, the collection offers a tense, playful, yet complex portrait of love, reflective of our contemporary moment. Rhee draws from a wide array of forms from poetics and robotics such as algorithms, narrative poetry, chat scripts, and failed sonnets to create a world of transgressive love. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love. 

As part of the Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts series, The OS presents FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, a revised and expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg''s variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition the book has been redesigned and expanded, featuring an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen''s writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate. "The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the ''human / other-than-human worlds'' originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice!"-Cecilia Vicu├▒a

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as John McPhee, Rachel Carson, Timothy Morton, Frank White, and others, LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD explores philosophies of nature old and new through poetry and science fiction. The anthropocene crisis and the crisis of humanity-as-invasive-species are framed in this text as global, as well as personal, misadventures. A mixed-genre work, readers encounter poems and stories-islands and continents-in a rapid succession of speculative geography, and readers are invited to join its beleaguered, psychozoic populations."Peter Milne Greiner''s poems range widely across space, time, and cultural history-from the Magna Carta to The Little Mermaid, from the pyramids to the astronomical observatory at Mauna Kea-and catch up in their full-throttle trajectory a universe of detail about the nature of things. Indeed, the poet''s brooding over the fate of Geena Davis as well as that of ''lame dystopias'' suggests nothing so much as Lucretius''s epic enterprise: ''I mine human doing, '' Greiner declares, ''for all its garish hyper objects.'' By deploying a language alert to figurative provocation that''s sharpened by a tautly disjunctive syntax, Greiner uncovers the apocalypse in the quotidian and raises everyday life to fearsome implication." -Albert Mobilio"LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD is in the world, but it''s not of it. Peter Milne Greiner is the voice of the cosmic mundane-sublime, real, and existentially funny." -Claire L. Evans-Hopping the Imaginary''s Obscure Islands :: An OS [re:con]versation with Peter Milne Greiner

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Women''s Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Disability Studies. Movement Studies. Dance. ∩╗┐''"[I]n the slow gestures / of a person adjusting / to too much light'' and with the faith of a chemist, Stephanie Heit sets fire inside her own dark and offers ''light someone not yet arrived/will understand.'' THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a breathtaking (which is to say, life-giving) book that both stills and energizes by breaking and reforming the unseen bonds of DNA, language, geography, and history."--TC Tolbert "Stephanie Heit''s THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a sonorous force field calling on tenderness, care, vigilance and abandon. An all-encompassing clarity saturates mind, spirit, movement and emotion. To locate the blind spot and unburden experience of the horizon''s relentless pressure--this is what the text does tenfold, imparting and dispelling the inexplicable along peripheries and in intimately centered frames of movement: gorgeously evocative and intensely realized capacious psychic flows."--Brenda Iijima "Stephanie Heit has choreographed, in her first full-length poetry collection, a deeply engaging articulation of the interplay between mental illness and the creative instinct, history and destiny, and limitation and willful boundary. Here, we have an author brave enough to say ''I suffer'' and talented enough to excavate the lyrical beauty of that suffering. THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY offers the reader a textured view of a graceful body torn between trying to remember and trying to forget."--Airea D. Matthews "In these fierce, moving poems, we witness a self as it seeks its right path through those landscapes we call world. We are taken along, wandering through urban streets or across beaches that once were lakes, sometimes dreamily, sometimes searingly awake, digging through stories and years. These poems enact one of our most potent human gifts: our ability to find ourselves tumbling, falling down, standing up--in proprioceptive relation to everything in our earthly realm."--Eleni Sikelianos THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind, these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and by experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations. Cover Photo: "Crossing Visible," by Gwynneth VanLaven

"In the tragi-comic-and worse-chaos of our times-suppose our writing began to appear as letters caught in barcodes. Phrases and bits of words breaking off en route to scanners designed for registering information but not the disturbance of meaning. It is, literally, with this provocative vision that Judith Goldman''s AGON begins. Fragments-words with ing or ite or ppeals detached-mark the violence and folly of our weaponized and otherwise benighted cultures. At times, a necessary lyricism wells up without betraying the truth of ''Cumulative transfers By the ''agreed upon'' price / the Temp, est has of late stripped the pe, tals away.'' There''s even more to this many-genred book-one to be lived with, in the urgency of its poetry, its philosophical and socio-political inquiry-font of brilliance that sustains vitally agonistic conversation across perilous divides."-Joan Retallack"The Commodification of Everything. That was the pivot point of materialist discourse not even five years ago. But now, it''s time to crack open the piths of the most fundamental doings of our species. After the sweeping tide of ethnonational victories currently sweeping the globe, The Weaponization of Everything, is not merely the ''speak'' of The Now, but the do of all its subjects, whether collusive or rebellious. Judith Goldman''s AGON is borne amidst this new reality. Few works of experimental literature aim so high as to flush out the full range affectual coordinates as to reveal their age''s Agon as a controlling demigod of our own making, that is, to raise up the Agon''s ''agon''."-Rodrigo Toscano"Judith Goldman''s AGON confronts the ubiquitous naturalization inherent in the weaponization of race, gender, global warming, poetics, language, utterance, politics, torture, immigration, and whatever else is changeable under the guise of aggression masquerading as mental freedom. ''...the intensification of weapons already in place, '' and ''...observed nearly everywhere, '' AGON deftly solders ideas of defensive assimilation (weapons already in place) to our conscious and unconscious activities of daily living. One can only bow down in shock and awe to AGON''s scorched earth dissemination of open-ended spaces to think, while thinking is still, hopefully, under what we presume is our jurisdiction."-Kim RosenfieldA cross-genre work that intercuts and assembles three textual threads, AGON inventories ubiquitous contemporary exempla of weaponization: in the culture propagated by neoliberalism, all social forms-ordinary, necessary relations, transactions, and communications-have been turned into fodder for social aggression. AGON audits the disavowed violence of abstractive technologies in their material effects, while also tracing the subtle anatomy of violence in its more "proper" spheres. Is poetry one of these? Writing alongside Amiri Baraka''s invective "Black Art," AGON builds a dossier on the aggressivity peculiar to literary speech, thinking this issue in relation to the volatile politics around poetry in America at this moment.

2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Finalist. JP Howard''s debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940''s and 1950''s) with snapshots from the poet''s own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother''s modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a "model" mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother''s overlapping lives unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970''s and 80''s: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter''s eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein."JP Howard''s collection of poems is a raw reminder of the experience of motherhood and daughterhood. Her sharp memories of love and neglect; elegance, admiration and inadequacy leave a salty/sweet taste not soon forgotten." Jewelle Gomez"Juliet P. Howard''s porcelain collection of daughter memoirs is enough to break into you like fine China the shadow of her legacy hovering just above diva, the tenderness of grief stained just below doll." Anastacia Tolbert"Praise Juliet Howard for the wonderful ability to bring to life a mother whose beauty, seduction and danger challenge the notions of a young girl growing up in her shadow. SAY/MIRROR manages to capture with sharp detail and lively resonant language the elegance and ambivalence of the poet''s mother and her world. These poems evoke images of passion and loss, pain and joy. We must all stand up and applaud the poem ''pushing her way to the surface... her shape on the page as she unfolds.''" Pamela L. Laskin"JP Howard stands out both for her fine poetry and for her passionate, unrelenting involvement with and on behalf of lesbians of color, all lesbians, and the LGBTQ literary community. She reverently celebrates our forebears. A poet, a teacher, and a curator, Ms. Howard has shown an ongoing commitment to nurturing our writers and to writing and publishing from her heart." Lambda Literary Award judges Reginald Harris and Lee Lynch"-to mourn, to protest, to wish for peace and to fight for justiceΓÇè-ΓÇèan OS [re:con]versation with JP Howard

Danielle Pafunda’s Spite reimagines André Breton’s Nadja in conversation with his Communicating Vessels and My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed. Spite speaks through the melancholy bohemian dream girl. No longer gateway to the masculine artist’s destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems consider what happens when we no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site. Nadja rolls her ex-lover on a gurney through a city on fire. She trawls construction sites, nurses’ brows, and apple trees. We pick up the tin-can extension, wreck ourselves on the delirious island, consider the dishonest belief that every day must include / pain, and descend a massive swath of silk. Spite has no fear of ugly feelings, nor of wonder.Excerpts appear at:Diode PoetryTypo Magazine

From the author, Nik De Dominic: "My pulmonologist once told me that the medical community would always have an interest in me because I was an uncommon presentation of a rare illness. Recently, I admitted myself to Los Angeles County Hospital’s emergency room because of shortness of breath. In the past, I would’ve driven home, slept it off, but I’d had open heart surgery about 2 and a half months prior. That day my baseline was blown, I was having difficulty finishing sentences, and couldn’t complete activities of minimal exertion that a week prior I could’ve ran circles around (see what I did there). Because of a fear of heart attack I was almost immediately given a bay, around 50 minutes after initially standing in queue to check myself in. The sheets hadn’t been changed and there was a large blood stain where the previous patient had labs drawn. Blood, also, on the rails of the bed and some of the terminals. A man who I imagine was admitted against his will kept leaving his bay, accosting the ER doctor, referring to her as nurse, demanding back his knife - his property - which was taken from him upon his arrival. Every five minutes or so I’d see his shuffling silhouette behind my curtain, him calling nurse, nurse. Another patient howled in pain as his charge argued with him for his compliance. Rate your pain between 1-10. 9 because a 10 I’d be dead, he said. The behavior is most likely narcotic seeking, someone else. As I struggled to breathe, Janna wept and caressed my forehead. These horrors, all, though, backdrop. Both employee and patient become accustomed to these spaces because of the sheer amount of time spent there and despite their initial terror, these spaces become everyday. They have to. Overheard: my charge nurse cancelling her Verizon International Wireless Plan because she hasn’t used it since her trip to Dubai; the patient in the bay across urging his cousin to leave his girlfriend because she lies, she is lying. Not sure about what, but something. And one doctor informing another that a sale at Joann Fabrics is about to end and though she glossed it and didn’t see anything good her colleague should still check it out. Ok, those, like death, are all endings, but you get what I’m saying. These banal moments the most common and only punctuated by code blues and other emergency, despite whatever an NBC drama sells us. Goodbye Wolf attempts to explore these spaces, the interstices of everyday and, frankly, incredibly scary shit. Chronic disease through the lens of backpage horoscope. Organ failure through vegan donuts. The anxiety of not being able to breath through tropes of fairy tale and the fantastical. Suicide and issues of mental health as postage stamps. The same pulmonologist told me lung disease sounds a lot scarier than it is, and he was right. As my wife and I waited for chest x-ray and EKG to ultimately be cleared without needing critical intervention, we made shitty jokes on a text thread with our five closest friends, a text thread that mostly consists of what new restaurant one of us had gone to, the ages of late night hosts, and more generally our television consumption patterns. That day, news of a child born and the baby’s picture. A true and beautiful rarity. Her birth and that new show with what’s-his-name surely more important than what any test would find. We had to believe that, know that, or how else would we have survived?"  

In The grass is greener when the sun is yellow, poets Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte engage with the work of dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Through research into these innovative women's dances, ideas, and lives, Rosenthal and Witte use language from and about the choreographers to create a series of co-written sonnets that are interwoven with letters between the two poets. These letters describe the process of composing the poems and branch into discussions of dance, poetics, gender, transgression, the unfolding disaster of the current political scene, and much else, in the associative weave that epistolary form enacts. Together, the poems and letters construct an environment of reflection, intimacy, and vulnerability, one that is both challenging and invitational.

"Filip Marinovich is one of my favorite living poets! He has lived his poems for many years now and we can trust he means it when he says, 'the tree's boyfriend is me / trim the pubes / and get ready for the muse.' Dendrophiliacs have a new champion, a poet as werewolf as they come, as beautiful as you can imagine! You love great poems and need this book! "¿ -- CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for DeathFilip Marinovich, author of The Suitcase Tree, writes: "I started writing a book based on a failed trip to Belgrade where I was supposed to stay for a month but only could stay four days due to breakdown insomnia grief mind voices. Went back to New York and listened to the book stop start. Then my uncle died. In the book we had the conversation I couldn't have with him in Belgrade."

The George Oppen Memorial BBQ could be considered a ritual, an invocation, a celebration, a protest. Its characters and landscape are an amorphous, chimeric Promised Land where retributions are real, demagogues are punished, and freedom is a call for both daiquiris and rumination. It is a network against austerity and homogeneity. It is a commune with enough space for the deepest of privacies. It is a place to destabilize the Western canon, to make cracks about Schopenhauer, to exile white messiahs, to mourn Fred Hampton, and Fela Kuti, and Federico Garcia Lorca. It is a brief rupture in time and space where possibilities are freed of their enclosures, where unrest is realized and invigorated. It is the moment when all the lights go out, right before the riot starts.

"Yo zillion pilgrims, Lori Anderson Moseman's 'Y' will transmogrify your hopeless chromosome. Text as performance installation, activist play practice, and you could be anyone in the colony working against collapse. There are daily exercises. Say what: be the insides of a peace sign seen from space, weep to believe in democracy, do what you can in the meanwhile. Keep keeping on - is Y, oh Y - words to live by." - Mk (aka Matthew Klane)"Lori Anderson Moseman's meditation 'Y' leads us from the hula-hooping body shaking off its rusts, to an enervated America that ominously looks to Cold War solutions while waters rise. Shimmy AND shimmer. As 'Y' crumbles, so does democracy. Maybe. Gender as Mobius Strip, the body rusts from the inside out, bones threaten to topple (like Frida's in her painting The Broken Column"), but the cure resides in spirals, circles. The book turns in on itself, gathering along the way, gender in it's swiveling baskets. 'Y' makes me rethink Orion in the sky, joy in the rhythmic tap of hula-hoop against rust belt. You will find your hips in this book: circuit, enclosure, zodiac, wreath, crown. '....a single body is not enough.'"- Anne Gorrick"Lori Anderson Moseman never ceases. To invent, then reinvent. To build, then knock down. To astonish with her slight of hand, then casually point out the somatic trick. In true form, her Y does, and then does some more. If 'obstruction is the body itself,' then 'Y' is our passageway. To what end, I don't know. And I rather like it that way. So long as Anderson Moseman is ushering us through, and through, and through. We know we will get there. Mother Courage says so, and she's armed with a hula hoop." - Brandi Katherine Herrera Much like you, Y is a catalyst¿-¿an indeterminate variable active in cultural production. A collective organism in the waste stream, Y bemoans their leaching marrow, tries strengthening their aging spine with a hula hoop. In grocery stores, in art galleries, at dentist offices and fuel transfer stations, Y hoops to lament, invent and foment. Y's looping traces analogy-n-ratio as if relation were the life-blood linking bodies to orbits. Y wants to impeach. Jaw gyrates. Hips open. Round and round, Y circumscribes the body politic in a kind of agitprop theatre that protests POTUS, pipelines, and spies. Trying to energize and not terrorize, Y gathers beloveds to fight for food justice, for safe environs. As a printed matter, the book Y is the textual residue of labor and play. A curious body holds, twists, then bounces a prop. Y calls these "poems" or "stories" a "somatic trick." In sum, Y's sonic practice is an interspecies interaction created to cope with the year 2017¿-¿its corpses and bar codes. Y is a little free speech corral.

'From Being Things, To Equalities In All' is a sequence of 24 couplets (1 per page), the construction of which has been guided by syntactical, semantic and graphical constraint. The results are semi-concrete and utterly political - a language capable of acknowledging the degree to which it is both private refuge and public domain, and a language aware of its situation vis-a-vis history's horizon.

What happens when a terrible storm threatens to destroy an island? Can one little girl, Marisol,manage to swim the ocean and save her beloved Puerto Rico? Monster Maria is a magical picture book that tells her story: a book about love, family, community and resilience. Sonia Manzano, Maria on Sesame Street, celebrated actress and writer, says, "Monster Maria celebrates the magic optimism in all of us." Cristina García, author of HERE IN BERLIN praises Monster Maria as ,"A charming tale of endurance, hope and magic."¿Cuando una terrible tormenta amenaza con destruir a Puerto Rico, podrá una pequeña niña nadar por el océano y salvar a su querida isla? Marisol y el Huracán María es un libro compuesto de imágenes mágicas que cuenta su historia: un libro sobre el amor, la familia, la comunidad y la resistencia.Sonia Manzano, la célebre escritora y actriz quien protagoniza a María en Calle Sésamo, dice: "Marisol y el Huracán María celebra el optimismo mágico que todos poseemos". Cristina García, autora de Aquí en Berlín elogia a Marisol y el Huracán María por ser "Una encantadora historia de resistencia, esperanza y magia".