Bøger udgivet af Black Ocean

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

"The thing about killing is, like everything else, it feels as bright as love for just a flash." The second volume in Zachary Schomburg's Fjords series of evocative prose poetry, this is a collection that engages with dreams and a complicated and ever-evolving relationship with death. These poems bring together vivid and unexpected imagery-"a tiny light-pink fruit fly, the hot breath of a bear"-while pulling you deep into the mind of Schomburg, where thoughts like "finding a pair of scissors on the moon, or when I die, noticing my death notice me" are just part of the life that inhabits the inlets of the imagination.

Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates inseparable. In this broken, scattered world that still finds a way to be playful and imploring, there is no respite in the trees and streams and no turning back on nostalgia for either nature or the city. Though the second installment of the larger pentalogy, Swamp Isthmus stands alone, archiving and organizing, rehearsing words to hold in the mouth for just that moment.

Joe Hall is a devout poet. He is devoted to trailer parks, the drafty inner spaces of domesticity where we cry out for our lady help. He finds god, saints, saviors, in spiders in a woodpile. For Hall, poetry cannot hold anything if it doesn’t break. Here, god is amputated from the ground, and the ground is opening its devouring mouth. The Devotional Poems is a prayer—a prayer by evangelical AM radio, oxycodone addiction, white pines, and the death of everything the body knows through sickness. A prayer written while walking along a state road and down into a ravine day after day. These poems ask to be your sustaining and poisonous vegetation. Pay your devotion here.

Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow."The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around."--Publishers Weekly"Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other."--James Tate"Zachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days."--Matthew Rohrer"It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Rene Char and Pablo Neruda come most viv

In 1974, when Ntozake Shange first released the cannon of Black girl magic known as For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, her opening stanza was a call to all of us. "somebody / anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself ...” This book is answer to that call.Anastacia-Reneé's words frame so many questions: what is sacred, what is beauty, what is tragedy, what rites of passage have we endured to be initiated into the complexities of our humanity? These poems read like rituals, invoking ancestors and Becky alike in a nuanced honest reflection of this time in life.These poems are stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood, and of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.

The poems in WHALE AND VAPOR emphasize exhaustion--physically, mentally, and as an existential condition. Kim Kyung Ju playfully turns toward the lyric in this work as a way to reconcile himself with the contemporary world by engaging in dialogue with his Korean literary ancestry. Masterfully translated by Jake Levine in close conversation with the author, this collection by one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poets to come out in South Korea in the new millennium explores the cold tunnels of today's tired, dark times.

Fiction. PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL: A COLLECTION OF COLORADO FICTION collects 10 stories from 10 of the state's most invigorating contemporary voices. This book was designed to showcase the rich writing talent located in the state, and the selected stories highlight a variety of short fiction formats. Six of the ten authors collected have previously published or forthcoming full length books. The authors range in accomplishment; from Denver's Poet Laureate, Chris Ransick, to Alison Flowers-a recent graduate of Regis University's undergraduate degree program. Editor Matthew Hudson writes: "More than twenty Colorado universities and colleges teach fiction writing, several of which publish their own highly regarded literary journals...I never found a collection like this, and when I didn't, I did some research and decided to create one." PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL is a finalist for a 2007 Colorado Book Award in the anthology/collection category.

Zach Savich's fourth book of poetry, Century Swept Brutal, offers a rapt and restless meditation on what Oppen called “the world, weather-swept with which / one shares the century.” In a landscape of on-ramps, mysterious lakes, disgraced social studies teachers, and signs blazing between “hot” and “dog,” these poems seek out their country’s real name while exiled within it. Century Swept Brutal presents the lyrical intelligence and singular observations we have come to expect from Savich's work—but here they carry the strange complexity of fake blood made of real saliva.

The Next Monsters navigates the cobbles of human monsterness. The image of a white horse in the road produces a sense of human belonging, while a domestic dispute fractures that calm, exposing a new monster. These poetic mini-essays churn with violence and love, healing and torture—one always eclipsing the other—and offer challenges to the limitations of identity. The Next Monsters embraces the alienation, imagination, and catharsis that scaffold the self.

The debut full-length poetry collection from Brian Foley, The Constitution boldly disrupts and troubles the beliefs we take for granted about ourselves and the rights we hold as true. While investigating ideas of home, love, morality, and loss, the poems also reflect back upon themselves, offering “amendments,” that question and rethink the poems that precede them. Taken together, the poems of The Constitution reveal the instability and flux of the principles we use as the foundation of our selves.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine. Kim Kyung Ju's poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: "the living are born in the dead people's world, and the dead are born in the living." Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE WORLD is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement. Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime--where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim's poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today. Jake Levine has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including funding from the Korean Translation Institute, a Korean Government scholarship, and a Fulbright scholarship. He writes a series of syndicated articles in the Korean literary magazine Munjang, translating and introducing contemporary American poets to a Korean general audience. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, edits at Spork Press, holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is currently getting his PhD in comparative literature at Seoul National University.

Poetry. Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty--rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate.

The follow-up to Swamp Isthmus, and the fourth book in the No Volta pentalogy, Meadow Slasher is a powerful and engaging split from Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s earlier work. All of the books in the pentalogy are connected through shared ideas, stories, characters, and settings, but they are also independent and unique in their voice and approach. Meadow Slasher is a meditation on violence and self, and it maps out the intensity of a break down, navigating a shadowy terrain of loss, dread, fear, and exuberance. Drawn from a place of questioning, the end result are poems that are eerie dialogic and unlike anything you’ve encountered from Wilkinson before.

Poetry. California Interest. Environmental Studies. In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. FOSSILS IN THE MAKING presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade.

Poetry. In the poems of Feng Chen's darkly spellbinding debut collection, BUTCHER'S TREE, the page evokes and provokes legendary creatures, kills them and puts on their skin--then cures the meat. This startling and unusual book is a medium that channels damned and contaminated creatures such as Grendel, Wukong, and Prometheus. It reconsiders what it means to construct a myth; to mold around a hollow space a materiality of shape that depends on contours without content. Life that has no life. These are love poems whose monstrous repetition demystifies these once powerful beings while at the same time plunging deeper into insensible consciousness, where the human ceases to retain its proper form."Like a thousand tiny teeth gnawing through language's tender membranes, BUTCHER'S TREE eats through the gloom of the visible world. Nocturnal, feral, and foraging, Chen's is a poetry whose 'purity strips the meat from inside.' Inside these mesmeric vaults, skins fuse and 'the cored body' grows rhizomes, burrowing into everything. The echolocating clicks and pops of Chen's alchemical practice make audible the astounding sound of our own 'hearts...growing teeth.'"--Lara Glenum"BUTCHER'S TREE is animal, foody, and thick with the materials of local and ancient and visionary worlds. My favorite parts feel ripped from the myths and tales and fables I might have known once upon a time, waving like strange numinous laundry on the line of Feng Sun Chen."--Ariana Reines

The penultimate work from renowned Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, Andes was written less than three years before his death in 2014. Together, the poems of Andes are an exceptional and unusual journey that confronts both life and death across diverse continents, peoples, cities, languages, and histories. In his eulogy for Šalamun, the Slovene poet Miklavž Komelj said: “Šalamun achieved this highest level, where the real question regarding his poetry isn’t what someone thinks of it, or if someone likes it or not, but solely, if we are able to endure it or not.” Like life and the human condition itself, these poems are at times challenging but also absurd, celebratory, and ecstatic—and completely worth it. Translators Jeffrey Young and Katarina Vladimirov Young worked closely with Šalamun before his death and render here a translation absolutely faithful to his voice and intention.

A house echoes with the footfalls of wild men running behind the walls in S. Whitney Holmes’s debut collection, Room Where I Get What I Want. Here in the house that is not a house, Holmes destabilizes the architectural structure by relishing in the details: a German man builds a mnemonic castle, a hero swallows a tulip bulb, and a woman opens a book to place in its hollowed center a gun. Debating space and intimacy, power and pleasure, Holmes constructs a spellbinding education as erotically charged as it is dangerous.

"We place our ears to the apocalypse." Destruction, recreation, destruction again. The bonds of humanity are found in the clash of rams, conflict that erupts into a cleft of life, a rupture that creates a beautiful revelation. What happens when the self is destroyed? That is the question Josh Fomon explores in his debut collection THOUGH WE BLED METICULOUSLY. This initial catastrophe, both macro and microcosmic, is the nucleus of the exploration, but what matters is the centrifugal rays—the discoveries in survival.

Brian Henry takes the blank, desolate canvas of snow and searches "for a river of color buried." With calm precision he sways from physical to abstract, from stasis to motion. The balance creates a chilling vista on the human connection to the ambivalent force of nature. Henry is the author of ten books of poetry and has garnered numerous awards as a translator. His words reframe perception with unsentimental observations and a seasoned comfort with the gray rapaciousness of winter.

Whittling a New Face in the Dark is a call to arms for language to rise above its inadequacy. DJ Dolack’s poems are born from moments we must work hard to forget: the child’s first funeral dirge; an empty, fluorescent-lit gas station in winter; at the bar, two drinks too far, ashamed and yet too aware of our surroundings. The speakers in this debut collection live in fear that the intimacy of solitude is indeed pornographic. Meanwhile, Dolack’s lines are laced with a macabre, needle-sharp humor offering hymns of affliction, loss, and light: no matter the darkness, the pearl-handled whittling knife moves to do its job.