Bøger udgivet af Black Ocean

Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on miniature and maximum scales.Sayumi Kamakura’s poems marry accessible language with complex images, inviting readers to participate in their meaning. She often juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on both miniature and maximum scales. The paradoxical frictions in her work resolve into moments of lucidity just as often as they perplex. Although she writes in the haiku tradition, her poems detour from the conventional parameters for haiku, such as syllabic restrictions and the use of a fixed seasonal reference. Her flexible approach to the long-standing form allows her to explore new emotional frequencies across a range of subject matter. The book’s four sections—everyday life in Japan, experiences in Morocco and Italy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and reflections on the pandemic—reveal the preoccupations of a poet invested in rendering her experiences with a mix of traditional and contemporary motifs alongside a subtle wit. The natural world is always close at hand. Yet, Kamakura uses environmental phenomena not merely to depict the world, but to create moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.

Poems that in their content and form simultaneously expand the boundaries of language and delight.Oh Eun’s poetry is characterized by genius wordplay, and in From Being to Being, he plays with homophones, homonyms, and various other devices while keeping the wit, criticalness, and beauty of the Korean language. Oh Eun is one of the most esteemed poets in Korea, yet his work has never been translated into English before now. This landmark publication will allow English-language readers to discover new endeavors and innovations in Korean literature.

Crane is at once a hybrid-form elegy and a poetic meditation on liminality and flux, envisioning the threshold as a site saturated both with violence and with possibilities for living otherwise.   Interweaving distilled prose and shardlike verse, Crane reexamines of two figures from Greco-Roman myth: Cardea, the little-known goddess of hinges, and Echo, the nymph whose body is transformed into reflective sound. Constellating personal narrative, etymological fragments, critical theory, and meditations on language, the book’s first section unearths a poetics of the hinge. The second section, “Delay Figure,” investigates the relationality of sound, the affective capacities of the nonlinguistic voice, and the dissolution of the desiring body, taking as its guiding figure the aural phenomena of echoes as well as their mythological personification. The book’s final section, “Inlet,” is a striking sequence of lyric poems that revolve around questions of time, detritus, and transformation, tracing ellipses of intimacy and illness, duration and ecological precarity.

Our Human Shores explores living in the Anthropocene, the ecological disasters life faces, and the barriers and inequality society faces in trying to create a better and livable world.Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics. Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse.Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity through extinction.

An acclaimed “poet’s poet” with deadpan wit and a gift for lyric innovation reveals an entirely new side of Korean contemporary poetry.This debut English-language collection by Shin Hae-uk offers up poems that rebel against the thin boundaries between self and others, human and object, speaker and addressee. These poems inhabit the voices of houses, colors, planets, childhood friends; they know the manic spunk of a good day and the dizzy lethargy of a bad memory. In this kaleidoscopic collection, Shin broke open for a generation of young poets the possibilities of time, tense, and speaker. Critics in her home country praise her as a prophet of the post-human, asking what is it like to exist and feel—as a dead animal, as a sound, as someone else’s memory. But for all its philosophical intelligence, Shin’s poetry is also funny, friendly, and sometimes even snarky, full of jagged left turns and mood changes. Shin knows what it’s like to feel you can be three different people within three minutes. These quirky, clever poems are for everyone who has ever shared that feeling.

A sensory-rich collection of poems that conjures magical worlds that combine the gorgeous imaginings of child’s play with the mystery of dark fairy tales.A lyric meditation on childhood, adulthood, parenting, grief, fear, and joy, The Sisters is a book of prose poems that began as bedtime stories.  A kaleidoscopic invocation of imagined lives, these poems transform familiar myths, fables, and fairy tales into whimsical worlds that are a bit more fragile and bit more true. Through a series of prose poems, The Sisters confronts what it means to raise children and grow up amid climate catastrophes, insistent threats of gender-based violence, and the shocks of late-stage capitalism. These are ethereal and eerie stories full of torn edges, a series of dazzling lullabies that will soothe you awake.

A collection of 29 ecopoetic vignettes that explore the complexities of politics and progress in the Global South.Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009. The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.

Poetry. Zachary schomburg has delivered his latest work from a dark place, where little machines repeat in a hollow voice, this is only further proof of your badness. presented in a single narrative, THE BOOK OF JOSHUA is a sorry heart begged out of dreams, death & a horse's eye. It is an epic journey not only affirming that there is a difference between sadness and suffering, but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. THE BOOK OF JOSHUA calls out in hunger and loneliness, I didn't feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.

Dandelion fences, twine wires, shoebox roses: Savich's fanciful, stark meditations showcase the momentary and the momentous. Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet's latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an "ethics of deciding to see." Momently stays alert to "the language you can stand when you can't stand language," cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us "here, where not even ruin lasts."

From the co-publisher of acclaimed poetry press Omnidawn, Risk engages directly with limitations, both those that structure the literal form of the poems and literary form and those that are both unavoidable and self-inflicted.In Risk, award-winning poet Rusty Morrison uses a constraining form of seven-syllable segments with breaks between to explore questions of limitation. In these poems, she is not just writing about constraints, but living inside and seeing how to manage them. In this way, the speaker of these poems actively experiences limitations as event, not aftermath. Drawing on the idea of philosopher and critic Hélène Cixous who writes that "the border makes up the homeland, it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke," in Risk Morrison aims where the border and framings she uses offer understanding and where boundaries should be pushed against and passed beyond, as frightening as that might be.

Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics.These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized "repetitions" chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.The poems of Lee Sumyeong's Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee's writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite-a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.

The debut collection from Bill Knott that influenced a generation of poets and rockstars is now back-in-print for the first time in almost 60 years and includes a new introduction by Richard Hell. Bill Knott's first book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, was written under the pen name St. Geraud, the fictional persona of "a virgin and a suicide" who allegedly died two years prior to publication. The Naomi Poems was received to great acclaim and brought him to the attention of such poets as James Wright, who called Knott  an "unmistakable genius." It also went on to inspire generations of fellow writers-from James Tate to Mary Ruefle to Denis Johnson. While first editions have become treasured collector's items today, and its poems mixed and remixed into numerous anthologies over the decades, The Naomi Poems is finally available in its original form for the first time since its original publication. "Bill Knott writes stunning poems in which he wires the head to the heart in such surprising ways that the results are truly electrifying. More than anyone of his generation, he shows us just how wild American poetry can be."-Billy Collins"There's no other poet like Bill Knott."-Yusef Komunyakaa

A debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore diasporic experience.In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo (or “song form”) of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Within diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from the history of the Roma in Spain, flamenco performance, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song.

A collection of poems that gives new life and magic to the everyday. Radio Days offers a unique collection by Ha Jaeyoun in a distinct, clear style, distinguishing it from her previous works in English. Although her poems range widely in topic, they are united by lucid language and breathtaking imagery. Through vivid impressions of humid childhood summers, Radio Days is an extended meditation on the heartbreak of growing up and being alive. Together, the poems create a whimsical, quietly unsettling, and nostalgic universe that is easily entered while refusing to make obvious statements on loss and love.

In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an "original shade." In failing to find what he's looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking, It's not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.

First English-language collection from a leading poet in South Korea. Kim Haengsook is one South Korea's most eminent contemporary poets, but a complete collection of her poems has never appeared in English before now. This selection draws on her work across her career and five books in Korean. Haengsook's poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring. Built out of a language that incorporates a strategy of what she calls "precise ambiguity," her work radiates outward like great waves whose philosophical rhythm you can't help but get caught in.

Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in the belly of the whale, and in that darkness, Wail Song asks readers how deep they are willing to wade in the water with blackness. The poems of Chaun Webster assume the world is not enough and is straining through each syllable, and with the end of the world in the rearview, they demand what we might do in blackened flesh with the time that remains.

Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “Iâ€? to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.

Lyrically inventive, ekphrastic poems that interrogate art, race, and humanity‿s dark history. These poems stress the weight of what it means to speak from and in an already “knownâ€? world.  In this debut collection from Keith Jones, the opening poems tarry with and think alongside the paintings of Cy Twombly. If Twombly is a painter of the Middle Sea, this song series conjures the longue durée of the Middle Passage. The poems then turn to resituate a “youâ€? and “Iâ€? in a world, our world, disfigured by false and deathly approximations of the “human.â€? Perched on the jagged-edge of how many known and unknown catastrophes, how do we remake, rethink, reimagine, repair in language and act our relations to one another and to the earth?  In the thinking and feeling of these poems, the great recursive swirling arcs of Twombly‿s painterly line recur and intersect. Beyond the materiality of Twombly‿s paint, beyond the materiality of the poem, we arrive at a profound place of thought, a kind of state, perhaps a republic of many worlds, alive to all our relations and how much they matter.

Some of the poems have been published in translation in English-language journals such as Asymptote and TinderBox Poetry, which have been increasing interest in Shin's work.Shin is very well-known and established in South Korea and will be a recognizable name to those familiar with contemporary Korean literature.Taps into an ongoing interest in Asian literature in translation.

"This is a threat." That's how Hackers, Swedish writer Aase Berg's seventh book of poetry, begins. Hackers is a furious, feminist book about wanting to "hack" the patriarchal system-both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the 'hag' behind the 'hack,' channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg "hags" back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence. The fury of the hacker/hag/captive/revenger is constantly boiling up on the edges of Berg's compounds and highways, threatening to infiltrate the center. In these spectacular battle scenes and hacked pastorals, where nature is besieged by the highways of progress and the animals don't give a damn about the humans, the hag rises.

Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

In Zachary Schomburg's own words, Pulver Maar is "is a collection of poems written between 2014 and 2018. Some of the poems are long, and some of them are short." These are every bit the poems you've come to dream of, long for, and expect from Schomburg, where clouds fall in love and Bob the Buoy bobs in the center of the sea. They are playful but not all play; they carry a humanity and an acute awareness of what it is to try to make a life, whether you're a mountain or dust or just a human.

Poetry. As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In FJORDS, Schomburg inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this."Zachary Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.... These are wildly imagined poems to fall in love with and reread."--Publishers Weekly"Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre."--The Huffington Post

In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and 'naughty, unwomanly" language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful. This skillful translation from Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, brings the full playfulness and intelligence of Kim's lyricism to English-language readers.

Cultural Writing. Politics. Memoir. What started as the angry scribblings of a caterer in Florida evolved into much more as the infamous Al-Qaeda soon became Scott Creney's closest confidante in this accidental memoir of letters to the world's most notorious terror organization. Scott lived in Florida in 2004 and worked as a caterer. In a world were nothing seemed to make sense anymore, and even television seemed like another hostile face of humanity, Scott began writing to someone whom he imagined was as bitter and confused as he: Al-Qaeda. Alone, in debt and utterly broke, Scott's day-to-day struggles to stay afloat, both financially and mentally, are a fascinating look at America from an outsider's perspective. Through engaging and at times disarmingly beautiful prose, Scott represents the voice of a new class of Americans-college-educated, but in debt and often unemployed. He is a member of an emerging generation of Americans who are worse-off than their parents, and who are struggling just to clear the poverty line. He puts his finger on the pulse of what it means to be an American, and how confused those meanings have become to all of us.

Poetry. Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren. Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun (1941-2014) is hailed as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, renowned for his impact on the Eastern European avant-garde movement. He authored over forty collections of poetry in Slovenian and English, experimenting with surrealism, polyphony, and absurdism. In this collection, which he was preparing before his recent death, he shows his mastery of sound, of uncomfortable twists of expectations, and reveals alleyways into humanity with sharp, minty lines amidst physical chaos and violence. Salamun has helped shape an era of poetics with his electric imagination, refusal of boxed-in logic and custom, and sophisticated concision. His voice will linger on for years to come in the influence it has left with artists, writers, and readers. For a career born from a violent world, he has left a beautiful JUSTICE behind. "By turns brutal and coy, gnomic and blunt, the Slovenian poet...insistently dismembers the world, only to slyly recreate and celebrate it."--Publishers Weekly "His poems will continue to defy categorization, but they will be remembered for the way they walked the tightrope between ecstasy and despair, the rational and the irrational, the sublime and the horrible."--Paris Review "He is too slippery to be compared to anything...His work is elegant and ironic and often surreal and lined with dark laughter but it can also be sharp and forbidding. Nothing is lost on him."--The Guardian "Salamun has exerted a great deal of influence on many younger poets...He's a world-class poet. He's easily the best poet of the Balkans, and one of the best of them all."--Iowa Review