Bøger udgivet af New Michigan Press

WITH LOVE AND DREAD AND RAGE AND LOVE,Or is it anticipation cut perverselySomething must happenDear ones, say you feel it tooParts of my body are blankIt's not a wish but it's also not CassandraI think about the word eraI'm working on ferocity and frankness: This poem failsHere an affect there an affectLet's reclaim sadIs it foreboding if it's factualOkay a little wishI think about the words period of my lifeIt's an endurance actHer father dies and I keep wadingHe has to see the cardiologistI want to commit to the poem but I can'tI get cold and cultivate selfishnessShe says each generation is called a word in the poemI write patience in my notebookI wait for my period and drink a CoronaI try to make it a speech actHave I given myself permission to inhabit my bodyI think about the alien insideI think about the phrase unwanted advancesParts of our bodies are blankI put my fingers on your coronariesCome at me

A chapbook of six beautiful and sharp essays by Steffan Triplett. "Questions that crossed my mind today: How much does a geography shape a gender? How much does time influence a self?"

In a q&a after a reading I gave at George Mason University in the spring of 2023, I paraphrased a conversation I had with my brother earlier that year. We were on the stoop of his home in Bed-Stuy, talking about technology, about AI and ChatGPT in particular. He uses it for coding, I have used it for writing. I don't remember, not exactly, the details of the conversation but I said something about training GPT on all the emails and texts our mother had written. "After all," I said (and thought), "what else is it good for?" Why else have we built such a strange and challenging tool if not to return to us that which will always be taken? What better use is there? The New York Times recently ran an article called "Using A.I. To Talk to the Dead: Some people are using artificial intelligence chatbots to create avatars of departed loved ones. It's a source of comfort for some, but it makes others a little squeamish." People have always longed for some sort of "direct line" to the dead. Along with purpose-made devices (like a séance trumpet), people have claimed to hear the voices of dead loved ones through the static of everyday radio waves, giving rise to the "ghosts in the machine." Even Thomas Edison tried to invent a "spirit phone," a means of using technology to commune with the dead. In this way technology has always been "haunted" and seen as a gateway to other worlds outside of our perception. In the spirit plane lurk our loved ones, anxiously waiting for the right technology to close the circuit, to connect. Even knowing that the psychic is likely a hoax or the Ouija board unreliable, it is still tantalizing to invest any purported otherworldly connection with a crumb of what if? My own work fine-tuning large language models is influenced by this kind of haunting, the what if, and inquires into how these models model voices that no longer exist, voices of writers we don't often get to hear, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. (No offense, Shakespeare, but you've been dead a while and we hear you all the time.) It is perhaps wrong to say that these models model voices: some machine learning models do generate audible voices, but large language models use wizardry called deep learning to generate new text by analyzing textual data for its patterns. The text in this manuscript has been generated using the large Generative Pre-trained Transformer text-generating neural network known as GPT3. A large language model, or LLM, is a machine learning model that algorithmically processes, understands, and predicts language in a variety of language tasks-such as question and answer chatbots, machine translation, document summary, and more. ChatGPT is a question-and-answer program that uses LLMs as its base architecture and it can perform language tasks quite well, such as writing a book report or term paper for Rhetoric 101. These models have been pre-trained, meaning they're already trained on the task of text generation. Fine-tuning is the process of further training a pre-trained language model, like GPT, on domain-specific data so that it performs better on specific language tasks. The predictions given are more adapted to the new data set, which is usually orders of magnitude smaller than the original training set. For example, an LLM fine-tuned on all of Shakespeare should theoretically perform better on a task related to Shakespearean-style writing than the standard model. I am not a machine learning researcher so I cannot speak to exactly how fine-tuning works or why even a small corpus of text is successful in shifting the model's tone and approach.

"In Fugitive, wild bergamot escape from their gardens while prisoners sleep in permanent fluorescence. Nature blossoms and thought fills the meadows, bridging the color between spirit and matter. This is Eden, lost and everpresent, filled with all manner of life-ants, gnats, butterfies and asters, love and suicide, the whole show. Nelson knows how an idea becomes a kingdom, how the losses of the past are balanced against our wishes for the future. Nelson knows that sometimes we stare into the orchard for no reason other than to stare." -RICHARD SIKEN

Minesweeper is not only poetry, but an exceptional piece of art of extraordinary caliber. Minesweeper sweeps us off our feet with its state-of-the-art bilingual-hyphenated, prepotent field of precocity and its intense algorithmic / microchipic tenderness / terseness / ingemination. It's so supremely well-balanced, so playful, so brilliant. While breaking our hearts with piquant line breaks, Jed Munson relentlessly surprises us with his accelerated gravity of recombineable, scrabblic, vulnerable inventions and cataclysmic candidness. It is a chapbook that defies our limitations and flourishes with dynamic, energetic wit. -VI KHI NAO"Do not forget," Wittgenstein once cautioned, "that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." One would never forget such a thing when reading Jed Munson's ludic lucubrations, which are as razor-sharp as they are full of risk and rambunctiousness. Engaging with Munson's Minesweeper is to get swept up in a poetics of polyglot playfulness. When the odds are stacked against us, it is heartening to know that there is a fine new player in town. Game on. -MICHAEL LEONGJed Munson's poems in Minesweeper get the far out present, the present present, the remembered present, & the shadow present, at minimum, together freaking the scene and sensed. They make rhythm and interruption be bound to one another as a multi-lingual record of consciousness, and this happens across a range of tones, textures, and forms in space constantly moving. I dig their angry and amused pleasure in handling and unhandling the steady intermittence of listening. -ANSELM BERRIGAN[Winner of the 2022 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest]

Oh man, this is a good one. The 19 scenarios in Eric Burger's Sizzle, a finalist for the 2022 NMP/DIAGRAM Chapbook Competition, are wild and odd, funny, lovely, weird. Reading these prose poems, one gets the feeling of punching through the veil between the everyday real and whatever's underneath it, some darkness, some language, much stranger. Ghosts, burning girls, strange beasts, dusk tunnels, holographic universes, goat people, circus freaks, sky piranhas, and mysterious spirals: this book brings the noise.

Go ahead, tell me-what words do you love? For to love a word is to love the sound it makes. To love a word is to hear the bells in it; to use a word out of love is to become a bell-ringer, which is also to say, a campanologist.In this book-length essay, Julie Marie Wade writes a sonic autobiography, a gorgeous inquiry into language, sound, and history.

W. Todd Kaneko's The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle. There's nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment, and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. More than a pack of wild horses, more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons, more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you. -MATTHEW GAVIN FRANKWhen the lights in the arenas go out, the poems and Kaneko's stunning visual work in The Dead Wrestler Elegies honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko's fierce but tender elegies, we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all. -OLIVER DE LA PAZSheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity's glory and gory days, where the body's currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability, transcendence and decay, Kaneko's lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon, kitsch and myth, the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief. -LEE ANN RORIPAUGHThese larger-than-life portraits are, more deeply, elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother, for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood, of masculinity, desire, and loss, a landscape of fantasy and dreams. -TIMOTHY YU

Six new essays by acclaimed essayist Marcia Aldrich, the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. This chapbook was a finalist in the 2021 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest.

The Square is the winner of the 2020 New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest and the newest collection by Lytton Smith, author of The All-Purpose Magical Tent and While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It."Lytton Smith reaches in these poems for the deepest collective meanings of the square as shape and place where history changes-and then changes again. These profound poems capture the after and the after and the after of human history as it has played out upon squares all over the world. In the transfixing convergence of forms and histories that surface in these astounding poems, Smith has created an urgent, stirring poetics of the square and its role in social movements all over the world." -Idra Novey

"To be unable to speak, to be shy, to be quiet, to be reticent, is not to be silent, or silenced--not if one listens carefully to the state of reclusion, as carefully as Jennifer S. Cheng does in her beautiful essay, in which she invokes not only the resonance of such a state, but reminds us, too, that the vocation of writing--always--is a call from within. It is a call she has clearly heard." --Mary Ruefle "In her concise, precise and beautifully rendered INVOCATION, Cheng's 'utterances' are urgent and even, at times, defiant. She puzzles out existence, investigates silence. The intersection of images and words teases yet insists: you will pay attention, you will comprehend. This voicing of the voiceless is stunningly magical." --Xu Xi

"These elegant lines cut deep, not into bodies but into thoughts, thoughts about bodies, about the pain, shame, and delight of incarnation. For Eric Weinstein, poetry may be vivisection, but vivisection is, for him, metaphysical, an art of awe and understanding, where it is not so much poetry as our own contradictions that rend us, that appear to us, in these pages, with such an arresting tension, between galaxy and microbe, flesh and metal, living and dead. These poems peer into the dark." --Joseph Donahue"Weinstein's VIVISECTION exposes the beating heart of its subjects with no loss of life: these remarkable poems are pensive yet urgent, allusive yet never needlessly elusive, grounded yet never sentimental. If this is surgical poetry, its implements--graceful precision, incisive thought, a meticulous accounting of the self's sacred and fungible parts--are wielded by a poet of significant subtlety and skill. 'I have a heart & so I know / how to make one,' writes Weinstein--and the reader who fully registers the tensile structure and pulsing warmth of these poems is inclined to agree." --Seth Abramson"What is this quintessence of dust to me? Hamlet asks a flummoxed, completely overmatched duo pressed into the service of politicians, not more than a breath or two after he's exclaimed man to be a piece of work. As if in answer, Eric Weinstein launches VIVISECTION, this volley of vaulting philosophies. Here, the vehicles of body that give humankind its various and temporary residences are real, fragile, desirous, terrible pieces of work. In one poem after another, the hearts and the brains tough out another moment or month in their nearly involuntary quest to endure. But in the face of inexorable finitude, Weinstein's poems know and sing what we need to remember, what poems themselves remind us: that the brevity and transience that we might otherwise rue charges our existence with meaning. Detail by luminous detail, VIVISECTION insists on the value and significance of the vast co-op that is life, sentient and non-. In doing so, he implicates us in a sad and gorgeous summons to a world that we might otherwise only fear." --Marc McKee

DIAGRAM.4 is the fourth print installment of the journal DIAGRAM . These texts are selected from years 7 to 9 of the journal, and are joined here by a great many found & recovered diagrams. Contributors: Marcia Aldrich, Steve Barbaro, Douglas Basford, Lindsay Bell, Samantha Bell, Elisabeth Benjamin, Ash Bowen, Jason Bredle, Nickole Brown, Stephen Burt, Blake Butler, Edmond Caldwell, Kate Hill Cantrill, Jimmy Chen, Nolan Chessman, Adam Clay, Juliet Cook, J. P. Dancing Bear, Lightsey Darst, Kirk Lee Davis, Nicole Cartwright Denison, Adam Fell, Matthew Gavin Frank, Emily Kendal Frey, Matthew Glenwood, Brent Goodman, Loren Goodman, Idris Goodwin, Amelia Gray, Marj Hahne, John Harper, Luis Felipe Hernandez, trans. Toshiya Kamei, Sean Hill, Eunsong Kim, Gareth Lee, Matt Leibel, Genine Lentine, Carlo Matos, Kyle McCord, Marc McKee, Ben Mirov, Trey Moody, Mark Neely, Amy Newman, JoAnna Novak, Brian Oliu, Kim Parko, Adam Peterson, Cecilia Pinto, Lia Purpura, Catie Rosemurgy, A. K. Scipioni, Glenn Shaheen, Nate Slawson, B. J. Soloy, Terese Svoboda, August Tarrier, J. Townsend, Michael Walsh, Kellie Wells, Cori A. Winrock, Joshua Jennings Wood, and Bill Yarrow.

Resurrected and restored through the bodies of multitudes, a young woman who becomes an organ donor after a car accident radiates unmitigated love as she comes to know the recipients of her heart and kidneys-lungs, bowel, vertebrae, corneas . . . Twenty-seven years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, black storks glide over the Zone of Alienation. Apple trees bloom; lilacs flower-radioactive wolves thrive; bees make glowing honey . . . A prisoner in California, a man who killed a woman a hundred times, who stabbed face and throat, heart and belly, now washes another man in the shower, shaves his face, changes his diapers, protects and serves a murderer like himself, riddled by dementia . . .Prayers, love songs, laments, confessions-these three provocative immersions through and beyond the body explore the revelatory expansiveness of consciousness and compassion; the persistence of love; the trauma of intimate violence and environmental devastation; unexpected grace; and the remarkable resilience of the marvelously diverse more-than-human world.

Parables. Stories? Poems? Questions? Dreams? Maledictions? Predictions? Definitely parables, at least.

"Andrew Dally's poems turn the ubiquitous McDonald's in the American landscape into touchstone, into rhythm, via a language that feels brand new. Like a perfect playlist for a long road trip, this book fuses disparate elements to build a moving, intimate mythology for our time." --Melissa Ginsburg"Andrew Dally's poetry is smart and it smarts. Charles Olson sd the problem with America is space. Gertrude Stein sd Anybody is as their land and air is. Dally answers all of that on his speakerphone while rougeing a fry & otherwise going 777mph & watching where he's going like Creeley sd we must(ard). Herein Dally trellises--with seasoned alacrity and tiny good saltpackets of humor--Japanese wanderliterature tradition to the giant cheesy M on high. It's sad. It's loving. It's lovelorn. And it's damn lovely. I don't know about you but I live for some kinds of etched sadness. And Dally doesn't disappoint. I am 100% satisfied that three winters from now these ketchupy lung songs, all the ghosts in the white spaces, will still be not quite tiring across the tars of my ears." --Abraham Smith