Books published by Spuyten Duyvil

Like Whitman's "Song of Myself," Hughes' Sugar Factory is a laud for the land, a deep song of praise for the ecstasy in the ordinary. Riding the train, peeling fruit, contemplating streaks of color-here we find everyday encounters opening doorways to memory, both intimate and ancestral. The result is a quietly fierce collection of poems that spans coasts and continents as it boldly "carries the voices of the living/and the dead." Patricia Killelea

Birhan Keskin's Y'ol is a singular accomplishment, a book about desire and loss and craziness on a grand scale, the Turkish equivalent, perhaps, of something like Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert.

Poetry. Translated from the French by Eric Gans. "For sheer reading pleasure and fidelity to its source, this entirely new translation of Baudelaire's magnum opus is matchless. With admirable disregard for the fashionable cliche according to which poetry is fundamentally "untranslatable," Eric Gans works from the startling premise that the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century can indeed be rendered in English without significant loss of meaning or effect. His daring approach involves sticking as closely as possible to the French original, combining the translator's modesty with a remarkable poetic talent, in order to showcase not his own ingenuity but Baudelaire's distinctive vision. Poetry lovers and students of French literature alike will applaud the result." Trevor Merrill, Lecturer in French, California Institute of Technology"

In Hard Some, each poem takes a relatively simple phrase-such as "two women walk into a town"-and then turns it into something that is story and meditation. These are poems that look simple at first glance; they are quiet and spare. But they build into something large, relational, full of other people, theories of connection and queerness. Juliana Spahr

Welcome to the nadir of post-employment, post-feminist, mediocre masculinity. Michael Levitin's wise, funny tale is brilliant in both its pathos and earnestness. You'll thank him afterward for this splash of world-historical cold water.

Why is it that the mingling of fact and fabrication in our civic life fills us with vertigo and dread, while the same thing in a work of imaginative literature can be the source of mysterious exhilaration? Beats me. But suppose that Roberto Bolaño had written a sort of disheveled novel about an apocryphal writer called Vladimir Nadal, fellow-traveler of various late-twentieth-century avant-gardes. Then suppose that this same apocryphal writer had taken a deep dive into the real life and writings of the Surrealist Benjamin Péret, and had returned with a double-handful of Péret-centric material, some authentic, some not. Then stop supposing and read El Misterio Nadal, which is all that and more. Whoever "A.B.," supposed translator of this dossier, might be, he has given us, in the mysterious Nadal, a figure worthy to join the company of Ern Malley, John Shade, Araki Yasusada, and other illustrious non-existents. Brian McHale Author of The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism

Sharon Doubiago's writing is fluid, unpredictable, and never stops giving. All the old songs sound new, and the lines between past, present and future dissolve in a rush of pleasure and sensual delight. The world is imperfect and in need of repair and she takes nothing for granted. My Beard reminds me most of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son-and the absence of closure is a source of both joy and despair. She is in unchartered waters, but the rules of the game are her own. Lewis Warsh I was amazed by her reading. This whole soul came out and in detail and quite complete. She's very conscious. She sounds like Kerouac or someone, like really good. The energy but it's more the details, precise details. Doubiago sees things, she notices things in the middle of these crisis moments. Allen Ginsberg Doubiago's My Beard is an essential book, essential to her body of work, essential to her on-going story, and just as essential for its outsider's account of the insider literary scenes of our time. I wonder how many great American poets could write THIS story, a story of mothering the sports star and the return of the ex-wife to the town of the marriage … Doubiago is at turns the poet (check out the detail of Max's hands) and Lucia Berlin hard-reality story writer. Let's attribute accomplishment to her projective verse poet's eye and her talent for narrative. Rich Blevins I was mesmerized by "Fornography." I'm not quiet sure why. The evocation of a familiar scene from long ago. The tensions around love and gender. The precariousness of your life. Like everything you do, it's raw and challenging, pushing everything of lighter weight out of the way. You're a fearless writer, and yet there is just below the surface the greatest tenderness, the greatest desire not to engage but to be at peace." Barry Lopez

Ed Sanders's great document is generative Ur screed for all investigation. It reclaims power for poets designating "'istorin", as scrappy yet sophisticated, timeless, adventure. Investigate the Abyss! perfect rallying cry for the Kali Yuga mess we're in. Data as sanity, as earth-touching mudra to awakened mind. Down with cognitive dissonance! Key scripture to Jack Kerouac School Naropa's pedagogy since early inception, Investigative Poetics holds ground in this elegant new edition with elucidating preface by Don Byrd. Long live the cultural intervention this text already was and continues to be. Facing ethical and ecological crisis and loss of historical memory and dynastic corporate control and greed, we needed Sanders's IP anew and available. It is powerful apotropaic medicine to the syndicates of samsara, a tool kit for survival, mind and senses in tact. And as brilliant antidote to distraction culture, you can actually wake up in the morning and DO something! We had early heady days at Naropa in Boulder Colorado, close to the great divide, and negative ions, and east & west sympathies and symmetries, and eidolons of TAZ and rhizome and icons and scions of the New American Poetry converging to test their mettle and imagination with one another, with horrors of Viet Nam barely over, sixties burnout, New Contract with America on horizon. We know the rest. During our protests at Rocky Flats, Allen Ginsberg wrote his doc-po "Plutonian Ode" I think influenced by Ed's method. We all knew how useful Ed's ideas were and carried them with us to other places and into the work as well. Some of the energy for my own obsession with archive come to mind, as well as the trickle down to field poets everywhere. Anne Waldman

For much of recorded history, travelers on the Nile considered vast swampland called the Sudd to be an impassable barrier (al-sadd, from which "Sudd" derives, is akin to "obstacle" in Arabic). The Sudd frustrated countless attempts to locate the source of the Nile. The Plague Cycle recounts an outbreak of Ebola virus.