news | Wednesday October 20, 2021

Hot Off the Press

We are excited to announce that A Future Perfect by Razielle Aigen, OЯACULE by Nicole Raziya Fong, and The City That Is Leaving Forever by Rahat Kurd and Sumayya Syed have arrived, hot off the press!

A Future Perfect operates, like a zoetrope, on the logic of the persistence of vision, joining the successive repetition of absence and presence. Like the sound of rain on a surreal windowpane, these poems constellate between the symbolic order of dreams and the imaginative space of figurative meaning – yet always tethered by the felt sense of being-in-the-world. Wonder is encountered in the ordinary bending of time, discovering what it means to be seen as two things at once; what it means to say “hello, world!”; and how to embrace the gene loss, simultaneously. Here we perceive orbs of light and shadow, entoptic visions collected in luminous masses that taper into peaks, swell into waves, and dip into concave husks – covering a variegated surface, a topography of uncertainty that transverses sky, ocean, landscape, organic hollows, canvas, and architecture – a territory upon which interiority and exteriority merge.

Pick up your copy here.

OЯACULE occurs at the intersection of poetry and theatre. The book’s dramatis personae inhabits a classical and cosmological world where psychic phenomena constantly threaten to impinge upon the arc of combat occurring between the women trapped within. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the writings of Plato and Homer, and the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, OЯACULE interweaves lyric expression of dreams, theatrical dialogue, songs, and the voices of both chorus and anti-chorus, interrogating the tenuous relations between absence and time, dream and memory, and conscious and unconscious sensing.

Pick up your copy here.

The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique instant-message exchange between Kashmir and Vancouver spanning more than five years in the lives of two Kashmiri Muslim women poets. As India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar, the authors describe daily hardships and small pleasures, share drafts of their poems, discuss multilingual poetics, and contrast the anguish of exile with life under lockdown. Their conversation expands during periods of intensifying conflict and personal loss, bearing witness to the harsh tolls (including depression and attempted suicide) exacted by patriarchy and state violence. The correspondence becomes a rigorously feminist record of two poets thinking through trauma together and creating new work in solidarity with emerging freedom struggles across the globe, “a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them.”

Pick up your copy here.

The launch party for these three titles (and others) is taking place Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 5:30 p.m. PDT.

We’re excited for you to read these incredible books!