Books published by Omnidawn Publishing

"The narrator of Anon opens the sluice gates of embittered confession and philosophical reproach to release a deluge of wildly extravagant lyricism, at first submerging its readers in the ecstatic rhythms of its music, then leading their pursuit of the behemoths of the human condition in turning its gaze upon the storm-tossed tropes of the narrative itself. Seidenberg engages his characteristically aphoristic style to manage multiple lines of inquiry at once. The resultant fragments navigate between testament and treatise, storyline and system, in a manner only echoed in the speculative vehemence of Beckett, Lispecter, and Blanchot"--

"Wind moves through this book. Wind opens the poems: to the dying beauty of the natural world; to the weathers inside the psyche and without; to the connections between father and son, husband and wife, the speaker to his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert"--

"This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's exuberantly lyrical collection, entitled in English Distantly, is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate series drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman's observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world. The cities of the individual poem titles are evocatively conjured rather than realistically described. Taken together, these poems distill postmodern urban life through their sharp flash sketches of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and shared struggles for survival and intimacy. Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real"--

"The typingspawning in IMPASTORAL is not in The Human, not in a human, but it flies through the possible voices of other outside-insides-slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language isn't human or not human, it undoes that very idea, so these beings-slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode mammaltexts-aren't on the outside anymore. Letterwords are cells or flummoxing quanta, particulate and mutating, waving about. If you follow science all the way around it passes through a pagebrane. Boundaries get slimed. A synthetic, nonce, and hyperpossible poetry. Your experiences are deformed into the experiences of other beings. We can hatch into a world we're not eating up. We are going to hear many faroffs very near"--

"Amanda Larson's Gut interrogates the agency of a young, female speaker in the wake of trauma and desire. Larson places feminist theory in conversation with personal experience in order to examine the impact of such forces on traditional ideas of logical agency. The book moves through Larson's recovery while questioning the limits of the very term, and of language as a whole. She employs a variety of different forms, including prose, Q&A poems, and a timeline, to do so, that reflect both the speaker's obsession with control, and her growing willingness to let it go. In this way, Larson's measured voice paves a way for how we can continue to live despite what happens to us in the process"--

"Agnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her, her husband doesn't understand her and lately, she's begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. Hopeful the time there will help make the stealing stop, when the spirits of the campers' parents realize Agnes can act as a conduit to their children, she has to navigate using her compulsion to either feed herself or help the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss and to reach for the things we hope balm us-both in our material lives and the ones we pass through"--

"Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building"--

"The poems in the book attempt to locate the slippery presence of silence in paintings and photographs, in the absences of bird sound, in ruin, pauses, and grief, and in the opaqueness of others and oneself. They address both the destruction behind some kinds of silence and the revitalizing possibilities in silent contemplation"--