Bøger udgivet af Black Ocean

"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.

This debut collection in English from Korean poet Moon Bo Young insists that you, as a reader, put down your expectations of what should be important or serious. While these poems are about god, death, love, and literature, they are also just as much about a hat with a herd of cows on it, science experiments on monkeys' attention, the eating of cherry tomatoes, weeping carrots, and pimple popping. The surrealism and humor in these poems allow them to travel so far in the span of a stanza. Reading this book is like going on a picnic with your weirdest best friend and asking them what-if questions until the sun goes down-there's room for everything, from dark anecdotes to funny quips and surprising vulnerability. This book is like that: there's room for everything. Skillfully rendered by award-winning translator Hedgie Choi, this is a book that will change the way you think about what a poem can accomplish.

For Nathan Hoks, a poem is a verbal nest, a weave of various scraps and strands inside of which something incubates. In Nests In Air, he makes this definition manifest by blending research of animals' nest making habits with poetic forms that create vivid imaginative spaces. Structured sets of four poems followed by suites of four images, the poems and images weave together, creating a nest of sorts. These poems are personal and political, social, and ecological, marked by conflict, contradiction, and uncertainty. Open the book and enter a space where "the slippery outline that haunts the soap / And the twisty timeline ghost-riding through me."

Poetry. Told in an age we can't quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello's debut collection twist up from tales of witchcraft and the punishing morals of the Newgate Calendar. Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind salt-lined windows, we are led to explore a world of simple objects through a complex fog of cruelty and longing, strength and feebleness, folklore and familial traditions. Violence, love, death, jealousy, sex, and shadows fill the pages of AT NIGHT. If you seek comfort, you will find none here.

Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology-luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey-Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book.Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations."Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark."--China Mieville"Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries.... When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts."--Asa Beckman

THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE is a simulation glitch; a cipher; a queer assemblage diary with a cut-up persona-much like Kathy Acker's Janey Smith from Blood and Guts in High School; an anarcho-punk-bot-tremor using as its source material a technical handbook on computer network security, as well as some chewed-up texts from Jean Genet, Édouard Glissant, Clarice Lispector and others who together constitute this poetic intervention. This booklnegth poem speaks into a larger body of art-making that pulses at the intersection of race, technology, and the occult-one signaling expressions of blackness that subvert their mediating technologies.

Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection--unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.""Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise."--Make Magazine"... smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal,' like the panopticon eye of a camera."--The Rumpus"... the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node."--Gently Read Literature

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. WITH DEER [Hos radjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world."Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Gorannson's translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. 'One by one you turned my faces up / toward the sun's surface / and drank them like deer water.'"--Cathy Wagner

The fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.

A philosophical-minded and syntactically experimental book of poetry.The philosopher Catherine Malabou once asked: “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” There Must Be A Reason People Come Here by Brian Foley is a collection of poems that attempts to answer this question by broadcasting the indirect effects of the lived condition of a subject squeezed under the structures of late capitalism. Lines like, “Hope is a chemical, not a dream ignited in the eye / that can be heard sober.” And “There is no sun here, / just habits of light” work through the contradictions of what it means to be negatively capable. It is a collection of poems that refuses to conform to the norms of what poetry is and how it must say things.

What motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts?  In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the idea of difficulty in contemporary women‿s poetry. Through close engagement with recent poetry and hybrid work from women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, Darling argues that textual difficulty constitutes a provocative reversal of power, in which writers from historically marginalized groups within society can decide who is allowed into the imaginative terrain they have created. In constructing this argument, she shows the full range and artistic possibilities inherent in contemporary texts that foreground textual difficulty as an aesthetic gesture. This is powerful reading that will change how you think about contemporary poetry and its subversive possibilities.

Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman's life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee Young-ju is one of South Korea's most original minds, and this collection, curated and translated by National Endowment of Arts Fellow Jae Kim, features a selection from her extraordinary body of work. These prose poems are often self-portraits, and together, they are as much an account of her life as it is an attempt to understand it. Pulling out threads from her past, she examines its traumas and tragedies and unravels a haunting dreamscape of intimacy and kinship.

Opera Buffa is Tomaž Šalamun¿s last testament. It is a book rooted in torn landscapes of Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Crafted from place and power, these poems are fragments of collective memory. ¿There are hands, inside. Concordance rises / There are no foodstuffs. There¿s no branch.¿ These are poems that  examine what is tender and terrible in the world, ranging from the extrajudicial civil massacres of partisans during and after the Second World War, to the prejudicial violence carried out in twenty-first-century Europe against people forced to migrate from the Middle East, North Africa, and India. Opera Buffa witnesses anarchical plutocracy, climate catastrophe, and so much more. ¿Do you feel the footsteps?/ Do you feel the approach?¿ This is Opera Buffa.