News

2019-05-09:

"In Celina Su’s provocatively spare poem, that fearful uncertainty lingers in the white spaces her readers must hopscotch through snatching thoughts from the air...."
2019-04-04:
2019-03-11:

"Belladonna* takes a collaborative approach to publishing, often involving authors in the process of creating their books...."
2018-10-19:

"In her debut collection of poetry, Celina Su meditates on the everydayness of large-scale political and economic processes—be it gentrification, state violence, or migration—not as singular events, but as diffused, on-going happenings..."
2018-10-15:

"The latest cross-genre offering from Hejinian operates as a repetitive and self-aware daily index of the mundane amid the mid-2000s financial crisis, 'whereby capital extended its efforts at privatization.'...."
2018-08-16:

"In the slim 48-page book, a reader has the chance to go from being able to pick Sneed out of a crowd to getting a sense of who she is and how, as a powerful, Black lesbian artist, writer, and mentor, she came to be...."
2018-08-01:

"Celina Su’s Landia could be the future of English poetry. It is concerned about placelessness/placemaking, language’s limits/unlimitedness, and the complex and contradictory relations between both...."
2018-06-06:

"Hyperallergic poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected an excerpt from Lyn Hejinian’s forthcoming Positions of the Sun for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers...."
2018-06-05:

"Subsisters ... reveals a new understanding of the ontology of language through moving, playful expression. Rather than fixing language, Wolf and Seita allow the reader to see the text for the multiple readings it can offer...."
2018-06-01:
2018-04-27:

"Celina Su’s Landia, recently out of Belladonna*, is citified, metropolitan, downtown, or rural if you like...."
2018-04-26:
2018-04-25:
2018-04-01:
2018-03-26:

"Uljana Wolf is a master of interplay across languages, and she has met her match in Sophie Seita. A dizzying display of bilingual wit to prove that 'two heads are better than ohne.'"
2018-02-26:
2018-02-16:

"This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge...."
2018-02-07:
2018-02-05:

"Poetry is its own not following. As it breaks and plays on the militarized forms of grammar and rhythm, it shows us other paths of existence. It shows us how not to go along...."
2018-01-18:

"The reader may participate in the porousness of linguistic borders...."
2018-01-01:

By tuning the mind to the ways in which language frames experience—and can even dance from one tongue to the next—Wolf shows how meaning and sense become an examination of “the lengevitch of a conjoined twin.”
2017-12-30:
2017-12-13:
2017-11-30:
2017-10-27:
2017-10-27:

"Their collaboration is electric. Wolf and Seita conjure up a realm where linguistic mix-ups and deliberate slips and ambiguities are new sources of revelation...."
2017-10-19:
2017-10-16:

"As I read Eléna’s chapbook, I hear her voice. It is deep, careful, well-paced—it is as if Eléna places sounds on the page, in the room."
2017-10-13:

"His ardor turned into an antelope-shaped ice sculpture, its taste and shape memorialized at film festivals all over Spain. Hers fossilized into ambivalent scorn, trapped under a notebook in Arkansas..."
2017-10-05:

"A hive song that is this collection hums resoundingly."
2017-10-05:

"We trace the dust lines left behind from the appliances..."
2017-10-01:

"being on an island, having a child, writing, and having a child as the reverse of insularity, namely: becoming archipelago, the edges swell up, are made permeable, build new mainlands for nourishment..."
2017-10-01:
2017-09-26:

"As if I could get un-situated / this airport a bubble hovering / in a void between celestial bodies / in but not of / the country I stand in..."
2017-09-24:

"These poems walk a fine line between condemning and praising our society, but never without hope, never without the intention to raise us up...."
2017-08-23:

"Firestone’s work inhabits this expansive and elusive middle realm between lyric and narrative..."
2017-08-01:

After only two weeks, Gates & Fields debuts at #16 on the SPD Best-seller list
2017-07-20:

"From the beginning (more than perhaps in my other books) Gates & Fields was to me a question about language, about which words might appear in the face of grief and death...."
2017-07-08:

To celebrate, we’re putting her book on sale. For the month of July, purchase All is not yet lost for just $10!
2017-06-21:

"I am lulled into this book’s beauty through the sounds and the sparse images that drive it..."
2017-06-09:

"‘Gates & Fields’ Is a Moving Elegy to Everyone You’ve Lost....Firestone’s openness is astonishing...."
2017-06-05:

"Firestone renders a series of deeply perceptive and formally sharp lyric sequences into an extended elegy...."
2017-05-30:

"There is a sparseness to Firestone’s short sketched fragments, one that packs in an enormous, and enormously restrained, emotional content while utilizing sound, rhythm and repetitions, echoes and precision...."
2017-05-28:

"At its center, the book offers the refusal to accept an already-formulated understanding of loss that lies at the heart of the experience of grief...."
2017-05-17:

"Jennifer Firestone’s lyricism coming out of this time is sparse. It is musical, made of repeating sounds, rhymes. There is space around the utterances and, reading, I relished this grace...."
2017-05-01:
2017-04-27:

"Given their multilingualism and non-tautological procedural approaches, the poems in Wolf’s Subsisters are hydra-headed, definitively open-ended. Rad...."
2017-04-25:

"These are 18 titles from the last year that have made me very happy to be alive RIGHT NOW when poetry has never been more exciting!..."
2017-04-12:

"I think flesh memory is about inviting the weight to hover around the body, instead of settling into the body. It’s very much about bringing something into the language...."
2017-04-07:

"in the cloakroam every woman received a twin language with identical clothes, a dabbling double. but the mirrors showed only one of us..."
2017-04-05:

"Firestone’s brilliant ability to move between different modes of narration is what I admire most about this carefully constructed collection...."
2017-04-05:
2017-04-01:
2017-04-01:
2017-04-01:

"In Swarm we read a chronicle, a cull, a calling into view and sound, the cycle of fragment and cohesion, part and whole, scatter and gather, charting the skirmishes between night music and Tonya’s nimble mind..."
2017-03-07:

"I lean in to listen. When Wolf tells me, 'multilingual writing is also failure, falseness, falling …' I hear this as good news...."
2017-03-01:
2017-03-01:

"I am always occupying both the space of being enemy-bodied and being my own body and my own experience at the same time. This resonates with what Akilah was doing in her work...."
2017-02-11:

"Rachel Zucker speaks with Kristin Prevallet about teaching grammar in prisons, trancepoetics, hypnotherapy, radical femininity, retrograde meaning, and what it means to be a tender of the garden of language..."
2017-02-02:
2017-01-17:
2016-12-29:

"Wondrously strange, eerily healing, like an overheard incantation..." —Cole Swensen
2016-12-10:

"MAKING SPACE is the kind of notebook that I wish I could muster, but so far haven’t within the confines of my overloaded life—my lifestyle’s “brute realism,” as Lim puts it..."
2016-10-21:
2016-10-03:

"Oliver reminds me that we are in time, of time, and that we need time, 'just a little time, to get love right.'"
2016-09-15:
2016-09-14:

Discussion hosted by Al Filreis with Yolanda Wisher, Patricia Spears Jones, and Charles Bernstein
2016-09-01:

$15
2016-07-11:

The poems possess a welcoming, conversational tone that allows them to flow as one nearly continuous voice. Murray's thoughtful and aware reflections echo points Audre Lorde made in The Cancer Journals and further the conversation about terminal illness.
2016-07-11:

"It’s amazing—and impressive—the ravishment effected by this chap-length poem: Natalia Diaz’s The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones—: These Hands If Not Gods..."
2016-07-07:

"Belladonna* Collaborative Is Redefining a Male-Dominated Literary Environment"
2016-07-07:
2016-07-06:

"This ambitious collection exposes and resists, in “small” gestures centered on a landscape-oriented page, the ways empire compulsively overwrites individual and collective experiences of time and place..."
2016-05-28:
2016-05-15:
2016-04-25:

"Torching Authenticities"
2016-04-16:

"Murray’s is poetry that makes the body holy, that illuminates the dark... Murray’s poems moon-walk between consciousness and flesh..."
2016-03-28:
2016-03-23:

"In her exuberant and expansive collection TwERK, we are never far from the lustrous melting point of language..."
2016-03-11:

"To say this is both a prophetic and timely chapbook is testable fact, since it was published first in 2006 and then again this past year..."
2016-02-20:

"Her lyrics are dynamic, electric and performative, composed as chants, mantras, sing-song description and sly monologue. Constructed as a book-length poem tied very much to the intricacies of place..."
2016-02-18:

"There’s so much going on in Foster’s work, and always, her articulation of complexities are equaled by lyrical and formal skills ... and a kind of myth-making, a recognition that the lives of ordinary and people deserve the heightened language..."
2015-12-26:

"Foster achieves a strikingly high fidelity not by zooming in past the personal, but by going panoramic — considering the “multiple as subject” and allowing Harlem’s clamor of voices to speak for itself..."
2015-12-21:
2015-12-08:
2015-12-07:
2015-11-09:
2015-11-02:

"One of the best anthologies I’ve encountered because the book shows a practice of de-centralization instead of map-making and canon-formation..."
2015-11-01:
2015-10-01:
2015-09-09:

Haikus of Grief, Silence in Harlem
2015-09-05:

"A long nocturne, Tonya Foster’s long-awaited debut collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court roves in and out of the dream of Harlem. This rich cityscape, pregnant with so much history and tension, floats through the consciousness of the poetic speaker...
2015-09-01:
2015-08-21:

"A definite must for any lover of poetry."
2015-07-29:
2015-07-22:

"Proxy negotiates the complex emotions around sex and love and offers sex as salvation with an assured poetic hand..."
2015-07-15:

"Through wordplay and an intense poetic gaze, Doyle delves into the extremities of human behavior to render a world that is at once intoxicating and off-putting..."
2015-06-21:

"Fagin cuts language into stuttering lines as she reenvisions human connection in her second full-length collection..."
2015-06-18:

"Foster’s imaginative work glories in language’s ambiguities, discords, emotions and logic—she allows that imaginative thrall to explore race and gender and political dysfunction..."
2015-06-15:

"The pleasure of beauty in the turn of language in Foster’s poem is the allure of beauty..."
2015-06-01:
2015-05-26:

"Sophie Seita’s rendition remixes Wolf’s German-English mélange to create a translation that is at once new and yet also brilliantly reflects the original...."
2015-04-01:

"This weekend I am awash in the arresting words of Akilah Oliver, a poet whose body of work searches meanings through language. She does this actively..."
2015-01-07:
2014-12-04:

"This chapbook is free. The experience of reading it is bewildering, powerful, uncomfortable and invigorating. Through her poetry Anne Waldman offers a spiritual exercise...."
2014-12-03:

"These Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry enable recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Grants are for $25,000."
2014-12-01:
2014-12-01:

"Not since Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages have I felt as possessed by history, geography, language, and their endlessly entangled footnotes as I did reading and rereading and rereading Twerk by LaTasha Nevada Diggs...."
2014-12-01:

"Proxy questions the extent to which the experience of love is distorted by the discourses that make it accessible to speech...."
2014-11-26:

"Sikelianos creats another visual time stamp that retraces the lines of her father’s life and presence and records the impression he has left on her...."
2014-11-21:

"The chaplet is dense in its form, the intensity of its language, and the registers and types of language which Briante has combined...."
2014-11-20:

"Kapil’s text establishes a sense that our inhumane treatment of others reveals us to be more animal than human, not the other way around..."
2014-11-18:

"Reading the poems in this chapbook, I often had the feeling of having your pupils dilated at the optician’s, looking through lenses at the eye chart as it clicks into focus..."
2014-09-01:

"TwERK shatters and blasts expectations of poetry, language, imagination, and social/societal existence: her poetic forms stretch readers into unheard-of or at least blatantly foreign territory..."
2014-08-12:

Submit 300-800 words in any genre by Sept 1 telling them how this collaborative feminist text has impacted you.
2014-07-30:

"on di saké menu no descriptive like quiet & smooth...."
2014-07-15:
2014-07-15:

"As I continued my read of the essays and literary work in Theory, A Sunday, it became clear that the kind of political struggle and intellectual labor in these texts made possible the relatively utopic feminist intellectual world in which I emerged..."
2014-07-10:

"Through that bewilderment we realize how much of our world we have left illegible. Now, alongside Diggs, we meet the dazzling prospect of reading it...."
2014-07-02:
2014-06-18:
2014-06-11:

"There is no other way to think of TwERK, but as a masterpiece of language..."
2014-05-28:

"Each woman contributes both a theoretical text and a short piece of fiction, and it’s fascinating to observe the play between these two modes of expression..."
2014-05-05:
2014-05-01:

"In her first full-length collection, TwERK, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs creates seemingly infinite layers of meaning that meld to produce critical social statements on both a global and region-specific scale."
2014-04-30:

"LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs creates seemingly infinite layers of meaning that meld to produce critical social statements on both a global and region-specific scale...."
2014-04-20:

"There is an urgency to the writing that comes out of Belladonna* that they create an impertive for the reader... These authors are creating change through their writing, by engaging with their language you are participating."
2014-04-01:
2014-04-01:
2014-03-15:
2014-03-01:
2014-01-10:
2014-01-09:
2013-12-29:
2013-12-28:
2013-12-23:
2013-12-20:

"Belladonna* is a sick-ass collaboratively run feminist reading series and independent publisher of chapbooks and full-length titles... Um, FUCK YEAH. Twerk"
2013-12-18:
2013-12-13:
2013-12-05:
2013-12-02:

"Why you should buy poetry this holiday season..."
2013-12-01:
2013-12-01:

"Smart, sexy prose poems that chart an evocative affective queer journey in our post-9-11 moment."
2013-11-09:

http://therumpus.net/2013/11/proxy-by-r-erica-doyle/
2013-11-01:
2013-10-13:
2013-10-03:
2013-07-10:
2013-07-10:

"Twerk unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching, and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in black music as in macaronic satire."
2013-06-10:
2013-05-02:

"The strength of Kristin Prevallet’s Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn is in its ability to make waking seem one of the most sought-after, and always ever sought after, experiences."
2013-05-01:
2013-05-01:

"Through reference to Kelis, found material, homage to an array of poets, artists and tongues Diggs pulls you into a body of work that is as meticulous and superbly intricate as the lace on the book’s cover."
2013-04-29:

"Because this book is a survival guide to the future—I mean, the present."
2013-04-29:

"Because this sexy book made me fall in love with the prose poem all over again."
2013-04-23:

"I am slain, felled, sweetened up and served by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK. It’s like an almanac-zodiac-aphrodesiac-cum-emetic: it’s going to make the language come out of you, and the knowledge, too."
2013-04-12:

"Doyle's prose poems blend the rawness of a natural storyteller with refined craftsmanship, and the result is little shocks to mind and body.... Refuse the dull — and anticipate readers wanting more of Doyle's conversations..."
2013-03-30:

This award recognizes a student poet at Eugene Lang College whose poetry has some of the features of Akilah’s writing and teaching.
2013-03-18:

"Proxy is as much a work of intellectual ambition and political strategy, expanding and exploring woundedness, as it is aesthetically erotic. If you want to feel deeply, to be pulled into Doyle’s prose, prepare to do so..."
2013-03-07:

"You will read this book and you will be astounded at how gorgeous it is to be alive and dying, to be a hot mess falling apart in intimate and public places, to be experiencing a rate of change that changes, a tendency in life towards death..."
2013-03-01:

"Hardly anyone was writing about sex the way I knew we were doing it, and feeling it, and sometimes fucking each other up and over. Sex and the body are what make us dangerous..."
2013-01-01:
2013-01-01:
2012-11-08:

"In Diggs’ work, there never is a complete ending, only a door to another ending... Oftentimes I found myself caught in another world, a world authored by a poet unafraid to mix languages for the sake of something new and indeterminate."
2012-10-26:
2012-10-07:
2012-09-28:
2012-08-01:
2012-07-21:
2012-07-15:
2012-05-04:
2012-02-12:

"Akilah Oliver & the Legacy of Grief"
2011-12-20:
2011-11-07:

"Bharat jiva a penultimate comment on the banality and glimmering potential holdout of humanity. Philosophy of philosophy, planetary biological religious cosmic consideration afloat on the tension of gerunds manifesting without always an I, yet I... "
2011-11-01:
2011-10-20:

"An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago... "
2011-09-12:

"Sinuous, seductive, rife with sexy, feminine energy, The Wide Road is hard to categorize. It blurs the line between poetry and prose, gender and sexuality, body and story, universality and individuality...."
2011-09-11:

"Archiving the Post-Human Future"
2011-09-08:

"Harryman and Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership..."
2011-08-20:

"A supremely riotous & zaftig take on the female picaresque. Language poets Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian join forces in a collaboration of poems & correspondence..."
2011-07-01:
2011-06-16:

on Akilah Oliver's memorial at the Poetry Project
2011-06-14:

Cara Benson on Akilah Oliver
2011-06-01:

"This extensive commentary by critic and poet lifts the interview with writers out of the formulaic into an entertaining (both women have wicked senses of humor) and profound interrogation."
2011-04-01:
2011-04-01:
2011-04-01:
2011-03-22:
2011-03-21:

"Here subjectivity (echoing Kristeva) is the effect of linguistic process, rather than something that comes into being before or apart from language. The collaborative nature provides a completely different conception of the self in the world..."
2011-03-08:

"When I read, I savor, letting the words be not a grocery store check-out-rack candy bar, but a handmade truffle, sweet and bitter and luscious. A sensual and erotic experience. That’s The Wide Road..."
2011-03-03:

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán remembers Akilah Oliver
2011-02-27:

"Newsflash: TSky gives thumbs up to the work of Harryman and Hejinian. Kudos to Blum, Hegnauer, and Belladonna for a thoughtful and pleasing design befitting the work of Harryman and Hejinian. Brill, brill, and brill..."
2010-07-01:

This essay first appeared in MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, issue 25.2 (Summer 2010), pages 103-120, and appears by permission of the journal. Copyright MELUS.
2010-05-01:
2010-03-16:
2010-01-01:
2009-11-27:
2009-11-01:

"Reading this book feels like watching a nature documentary that takes place inside an organic body and slowed down just a second or two so that the movements of its simulated natural world become trance-like..."
2009-11-01:
2009-05-01:
2009-03-23:
2009-03-02:

"This is a remarkable book by and about a remarkable young woman, who left us way too soon..."
2009-02-02:

"We are presented with a field of blurred bodies, pearlescent with longing and without barrier. There is no immutable inside or outside here except in the most exorbitant sense—everything is inside, and everything is outside... "
2008-11-11:
2008-07-20:
2008-03-31:

"Mauve Sea-Orchids is one of the most gorgeous, stunning and impressive feats of a poetry collection I’ve read in a long while..."
2008-02-27:

"You can open at random and every single page contains sinuous, luminous passages, which also often contain deeper meanings. . . Moi poetics: no need to deny the serpents the luminous flowers, for those blooms' fragrances are ferocious...!"
2007-10-10:
2007-10-01:
2007-03-01:

"Four From Japan showcases a diverse and reflective body of Japanese verse and other writings that is strongly recommended reading, a seminal addition to academic library poetry collections, and a welcome contribution to Japanese Cultural Studies..."
2006-11-15:
2000-07-01:

"The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be": Stretching the Dialogue of African-American Poetry
2000-02-01:

Discussion of Akilah Oliver's she said dialogues: flesh memory. Rachel Levitsky and Tisa Bryant.