Books published by Omnidawn Publishing

A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections.

Evolved from the poet's observation of the daily practice of Tai Chi Sword, this title includes poems that evoke the fluidity of martial art practice, the motion of Chinese brushstroke painting, as well as the shifting physical and metaphysical arena that is human relationship. Each poem title is one of the 54 sword movements of Tai Chi.

Using a replica of the native Chamorros' outrigger boats as his figurative vessel, this title explores the personal, historical, cultural, and natural elements of the poet's native Guam.

Saga / Circus brings us two distinctly different long poems

"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"--

The first U.S. translation of the award-winning Galician poet

"With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second full-length book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House use physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and "show dogs with bejeweled collars" crowd into Win's real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family's homeland of Burma, haunt the book's six sections, as forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke. The artful assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon "a circle of drums and copper bells" to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This carefully curated collection of unlikely objects and images creates an act of ritual that uses language to interrogate how pain can transform into a nat or a siren. The minimal line length belies maximal imagination in this remarkable new book"--

"Winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Novelette Prize, selected by Meg Ellison. This magical realist tale follows the travails of a burnt-out Queens' teacher who spends his time obsessing over the fact that he has been cheated out of living in his Grandma Rose's Lower East Side apartment, and is thus priced out of his 'More Recent Ancestral Home', Manhattan, that is. Rothman weaves a rich story about real estate and memory. Daniel, our protagonist, is haunted by the remembrances of his childhood experiences in his grandmother's apartment. One day he discovers a hidden relic on Rivingston Street, a tenement reclamation office run by an eccentric centurion named Hannah. When Daniel inquires about the chances of his reclaiming his grandmother's old tenement, Hannah is not impressed. "Things don't work like that, you rude, young schlub!" And so begins Daniel's journey to reclaim his past and to land an affordable space for his family in downtown Manhattan. This is a journey full of twists and turns, ups and downs, and an ending that would make even the most thick-skinned NYC real estate agent shake"--

"Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation, part prayer, elevating the confessional by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. A pop surreal romp reckoning with lyric buoyancy through a mythic apocalypse, mysteriously stark and playful. We meet voices trying to survive, reconcile their own belonging, maybe, that drop in and out of a mystic narrative. What happens in the aftermath of brutality? What do you do? The poems begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape is itself too unsettled; the form varies and reflects this endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. What can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language-an unbroken attention to the speaker's own authority. Creating an architecture and landscape that expresses both a ruination of cultural time and an eternity of interior time, confession and lyric become as much about the I as the you/we"--

"The "breathing place" - individual, bespoken - is where the world enters uninvited, where "fair is only an experiment," where poetry's resistance has "slackened, gray, with some rain," where "the garden is a gulf in the intercom, where "today's word from Delphi / is delphinium, expensive / blue word, dust payment due tomorrow," where "seven of my sweet loves drove off of cliffs . . ." - in short, a place of jolts and wrongs, if also of opportunities: "Engage / Lower your oars for the recommencing." It is met here by a style of nervous immediacy, a style built for alertness, not comfort, ready to shove the English language around Americanly, as Gertrude Stein encouraged and Dickinson mastered, and, further, to break out of reality, that already known"--

Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.

"Inspired by Lorca's passionate cante jondo or deep song, and the artist author's family history with Andalusian flamenco, Raft of Flame's poems weave together in a time-travelling epic that searches myth and nature for identity, personal and cultural. Imagining when Cortâes lands in Mexico, the collection includes conversations between a conquistador and an Olmec sculpture, Frida Kahlo and Velazquez, Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch. Navigating her Latina and European heritage through art made by artists of the ancient Americas and Spain, Alvarez maps intersections between personal and political history. Vivid lyrics interrogate the complexities of mixed race. Vital to its narrative is how nature continues to be trapped in the violence of colonization"--

"The addiction of devotion to proper names is a perennial problem and it will be going nowhere. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that precise and, possibly, eternal addiction. LM Rivera continues his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against grounded, so-called straight forward, naive, sentimental, easy narratives-opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting, experimental formations of thinking through a concept to its (im)possible end. The grand philosopher, Martin Heidegger, acts as guide and whipping boy (and well deserved), as the author of this collection attempts to sever many troubled but lasting attachments to myriad traditions-be they overt, canonical, hidden, esoteric, forbidden, or downright disgraceful"--

"La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living runs a bow across physical and mental planes to reveal the kingdoms inhabiting them. From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real and imagined. Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit, showering us all in an antidotal salve to viewing any life as ordinary. Banzai has a literal translation of "10,000 years" and was used by the Japanese as a rallying cry in imperialistic and militaristic contexts. Today, the word has a comparatively neutral translation of "Hurrah!" in Japan and beyond. In La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living, Hasegawa aims to reclaim banzai, recasting the language of war and blind loyalty into the language of a life and poetry created against racism and harmful norms, and toward tolerance and self-acceptance"--

"Scatterplot navigates the landscape of imagination through a series of variations on being lost-and found. Koehn's investigations allow the failures of consciousness, the gaps in the knowable, as he grapples with a sensory terrain perceivable in the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. Here is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California Delta through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but requiring, love. The work diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and details about members of his family into a web of coordinates forming constellations of beauty and tragedy. From the music of Bad Brains to the life-cycle of the Tongue Eating Louse to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys to the talking poems of David Antin to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain - the work details both how this writer embraces the present, and takes responsibility for his insufficiencies and fiascos, in a world so full of imperfection one can't but both laugh and cry. In what amount to a mix of experiments - erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking/talking poems, and more - the delta between right now and forever seems inextricably present and pleasurably mixed. Wild vulnerability, infinitely odd observation, and uninhibited daring inhabit these poems"--

"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"--

As the title of The Not Forever suggests, these poems take not only mortality, but also the impossibility of truly assessing mortality, as their endlessly inexplicable subject.

Focusing on 21 works of prose from an esteemed poet, translator, and visual artist, this collection reflects an ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, as well as the aural and the visual.

"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"--