Melissa Buzzeo

Of Lilies Muskroot Crocuses and Something Similar

Melissa Buzzeo

And he sang for me in the Naropa hotel a mourning song his grandmother from rural

Pennsylvania taught him and that he later sang when his boyfriend Earth was killed. He was

thinking of singing it instead of talking about crystals on the panel but then talked about

crystals on the panel we were on together. And she handed me a strawberry from her

April 13, 2018

Poetry in ruins

Allison Conner

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil and The Devastation by Melissa Buzzeo were published by the same press, Nightboat Books, on the same day in 2015. How do these two works speak to one another? Taken together both pieces gleefully frazzle and implode a number of genres: novel, poem, historical fiction, autobiography, performance text, theory. The works situate readers in psychogeographical outskirts, landscapes that wish to enact a language turned away from violent erasures and silencings. Who does literature serve?

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil and The Devastation by Melissa Buzzeo were published by the same press, Nightboat Books, on the same day in 2015. How do these two works speak to one another?

Taken together both pieces gleefully frazzle and implode a number of genres: novel, poem, historical fiction, autobiography, performance text, theory. The works situate readers in psychogeographical outskirts, landscapes that wish to enact a language turned away from violent erasures and silencings. Who does literature serve?

Recently in Jacket2

Three pebbles

Or, the minimal materialisms of late modernism

Joshua Corey

Photo by Sandro Arcais, via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mugoni_beach._Three_Pebbles_of_different_colors..JPG> Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Photo by Sandro Arcais, via Wikimedia Commons.

What is a pebble? Is it an object or a thing? A weapon or a tool? Is it naïve or is it sentimental? Is it a token of the real, or a fragment of ideology? Can you do more than skip it or hurl it or mark a grave with it? What is the pebble to poetry? Of what might the poem make it speak?

February 18, 2019

Jerome Rothenberg and Ariel Resnikoff

'A Poem Beginning with Two Lines by Likht' (in English and Yiddish)

Jerome Rothenberg

[Author’s Note:“A lid vos heybt on mit tsvey shuros fun likhtn”(“A Poem Beginning with Two Lines from Likht”) is a translingual epistolary experiment and collaborative double-iteration between English and Yiddish poetic tongues. Mikhl Likht (1893–1953), our radical Yiddish modernist ancestor (New York and “Objectivist” based) calls out from the interstices of an expanded-Yiddish praxis, coaxing our poem into the the wor(l)d with two lines from his “poem-of-a-life,” Protsestiyes (Processions).

A life lived in pause

Lynley Edmeades's 'As the Verb Tenses'

Anna Smaill

Photo of Lynley Edmeades (right) by Rory Mearns.

As the Verb Tenses is interested in varieties of distance — physical, temporal, emotional. As a collection, it seems not always certain whether to embrace or to overcome these distances. There is insight to be gained in the cultivation of detachment, it suggests; but might there be something lost in moments of hesitation?