Nightboat Books is thrilled to announce the publication of Laura Moriarty’s A TONALIST

Cole Swensen writes:

“Some people write lyric poetry because they just want to and think it is great. Some write it though they think it is impossible. The latter are A Tonalists.” Thus Moriarty sums up an unusual understanding of some extremely important fine points of 21st century poetics. These points are unpacked, unfolded, and hung out for inspection by the textual community that she constructs among these pages. Always synesthetic, always formally relentless, in A Tonalist, Moriarty manages to keep a penetrating ethical-philosophical inquiry alive within a lyric terrain.

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Stephen Cope writes:

Are we a Tonalist or atonalist? If not for books like Laura Moriarty’s, such a distinction might seem a mere travesty of phono-morphenic coincidence. But here, where “musical, literary and artistic tonalities seem the same,” constituting a “finely dissonant harmony,” one can actually think difference as a staple of belonging – to a community (both imagined and invoked), to an aesthetics (both defined and diffuse), to a poetics (both inherited and expanded), to a place (both described and transformed), and to a politics at once lived, suffered, resisted, and transformed. “Aligning/ light with time,” Morairity’s A Tonalist explores – in appropriately trans-generic form — the shades, timbres, and temporalities of affinity with a warmth and intelligence rarely encountered in this age of ironic overdetermination. This is, simply put, a moving and vital book.

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The books was reviewed in the June 28th issue of Publisher’s Weekly:

The California Tonalist painters of the early 20th century were arguably the first modern artists to capture West Coast light and space. Moriarty’s long and challenging work–part verse, part prose poem, part manifesto–juxtaposes painters with composers (atonal music) and both with questions about tone, goal, and audience in experimental writing, trying to articulate an outlook at once appropriate to the West Coast and to Moriarty’s uneasy temperament. Studded with quotations from other experimental writers, the volume also looks back at the texts that Moriarty (A Semblance) has admired through her own prolific career. Sometimes showing signs of the blog posts from which it grew, and sometimes distressingly involuted, Moriarty’s project nonetheless makes clear its big ambitions: “The Imaginary Community” called into being by West Coast writing should, she writes, be “Real as thought/ When thought/ Plain as paint or/ Audible sings/ In tones that/ In times which/ These darknesses seem light.” Not only the landscape, but the political climate, the years of the Iraq war and the seasons of ecocatastrophe resonate throughout these pages.

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Colin Herd writing in 3:AM Magazine:

Nightboat Books deserves a medal (or at the very least a bear-hug) for reissuing Bruce Boone’s prose memoir Century of Clouds, thirty years after its initial publication. Making this hitherto-impossible-to-find book by the legendary San Francisco based New Narrative writer obtainable and accessible at last is worthy in itself, but to have done so in such a gorgeous edition, with an extremely useful introduction by Rob Halpern that doubles up as one of the best contextual introductions to New Narrative I’ve ever read, and with a new afterword by the author himself, is nothing short of a (erm) boon.

Read the full review here.

On Tuesday, April 20, 7pm, join 

EDOUARD GLISSANT Distinguished Professor of French, Graduate Center, CUNY

in conversation with

MICHAEL DASH Professor of French, NYU; author of Edouard Glissant; The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context

and

NATHALIE STEPHENS Author; translator of Poetic Intention

On the occasion of the publication of Poetic Intention (Nightboat Books), the first English-language translation of Glissant’s meditation on poetry and art.

La Maison Francaise, NYU
16 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003
Free and Open to the Public
Tel: (212) 998-8750

Visit the Nightboat Books table at D16 in Exhibit Hall A

at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, April 8-10, 2010.

and join us for the

Action Books, Litmus Press, and Nightboat Books Reading 

Featuring: 
Paula Cisewski, Brenda Iijima, Sandy Florian,
Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, Dawn Lundy Martin,
Laura Moriarty, Matt Reeck, Abe Smith,
Nathalie Stephens, Stacy Szymaszek & Edwin Torres

on Thursday, April 8, at 7:30 (Free) at
Thin Man Tavern, 2015 East 17th Avenue (at Race Street) in Denver.
A short cab ride away or short ride on the number 20 bus (get on a 17th Avenue and Welton, exit at 17th Avenue and Race Street).

Also, visit the Nightboat Books Table (D16 in Exhibit Hall A) for the following author signings:

Lytton Smith’s The All-Purpose Magical Tent, which won the 2007 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and was published last year, continues to garner excellent review.

In the current Boston Review, the reviewer claims: “This first book is the work of a poet already in his prime.” The full review can be found here.

Jerry Magazine states: “ The reverberation of Smith’s sensibility is often felt long after one has finished reading.” Read the full review here.

Order the book here or here.

We’re delighted to announce the winner of the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize:

Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin

Selected by Fanny Howe
to be Published February 2011

Dawn Lundy Martin, a poet, essayist, and activist, was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007). She is also the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship, and The Undress, a chaplet published by Belladonna Books.  A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

 
Fanny Howe’s citation:

“These poems are dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye. I was reminded of Leslie Scalapino, the sensitivity to the surrounding arrangements and to human suffering. There is no distance from Martin’s subject, but immersion and emotional conflict. Discipline is what it took to write such a potent set of poems.”

From Discipline:

How do we encounter the many hours past twilight? We understand
that the light is something other, that it catapults us toward a desire
or two if we’re lucky. But, lately, daylight eats itself, and is percussive
in its chewing, a carnival of curses and thumps. Nothing is wrong. In
the hours after the whinny of the long train passing, we continue to
think, how special we are, how born and cosmic, how just plain indi-
vidual, but it is not enough. Nothing out there. Everything out there.
What does it matter then, if the body climbs into a plastic car, drives
into a deserted driveway and becomes another self? Elsewhere: One
body found. One policeman shot. One 4-year-old girl shot. Teeter,
tweeter, la, la, la, la, la. I am the I watching the I lift. Roads are short
with darkness. I think, this is what they mean when they say, Savage.

THE FINALISTS (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY LAST NAME) ARE:

Brian Barker of Denver for The Black Ocean
Michael Tod Edgerton of Athens, GA for Vitreous Hide
Jennifer Firestone of Brooklyn for Flashes
Ryan Flaherty of Dover, NH for What’s This, Bombardier?
Esther Lee of Salt Lake City for Spit & Saliva
Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow of Iowa City for Whale in the Woods
Alexandra Mattraw of San Francisco for honest as any treeless place
Lance Phillips of Huntersville, NC for Mimer

We will be featuring the finalists on our webpage through the spring, so please check back.

Bruce Boone made a rare visit to New York City last weekend to celebrate the publication of the new edition of Century of Clouds. He read at the Nightboat Books Winter Release Party and, with Rob Halpern, in the Segue Reading Series. He also made his fist visit to the Frick Collection. Read Thom Donovan’s report (which included his introduction to Bruce’s reading at Segue) on the Poetry Foundation Blog here.

Review of Tiresias:

Read Kevin Killian’s amazing review of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman:

As we discover, other reasons caused Hickman to put his own work on the back burner, and it sounds as though while we were all waiting for a successor to the one book, the “Great Slave Lake Suite,” Hickman was actually not writing much of anything at all. Editing Temblor and maintaining, in the days before e-mail, a vast correspondence with many of the world’s most innovative poets, ate up his time, and of course so did AIDS. Motika produces a few “new” pieces (of very high quality), but don’t go looking to this new collection for lots and lots of new material; instead the value of the book is twofold, it returns to print the major work of an interesting poet, and in addition it simplifies and makes legible by re-arrangement, the order and the valences of this work.

It is a prophetic, shamanic work fueled by rage, grief and sudden bursts of homosexual feeling. Hickman lived in a dangerous age in dangerous cities, and he was punished, imprisoned, institutionalized for his penchant for public sex. A private story makes itself felt through the densest and most lyrical parts of his poems, something to do with his dad, an intense Oedipal love hate thing like Raymond Massey slapping James Dean in Kazan’s film of East of Eden. In one excruciating passage the father strips the son to dowse him with a burning liquid to rid him of crabs, souvenirs of the teenager’s uncontrollable need for sex with strangers. Hickman’s poetry often seemed to me to be a queer amalgam of Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and something of Swinburne in him, a masochistic drive that spits the words out over the page (many lines begin with the single word “o,” not the uppercase “O” of Keats, but just a tiny little mouth remembering) and create a portrait etched in acid. And like William Burroughs’ wild boys, his memories seem to reach back to a prewar paradise of roadsters, red-tiled public toilets, outhouses with rattlers twisting in the Pasadena sun. The speaker derives power from the scopophilia that makes him anxious to see, to watch, the forbidden accdientally exposed, in a dramatic rehearsal of his own early abuse.

That makes Tiresias sound sensational, and Mohr advises us not to think of Hickman’s writing as “confessional” in any shape or form. Hickman’s sophisticated, alienated use of language allows him to revisit American trauma, by endowing the primal with a series of complicating screens and taxonomies. I don’t know, it still seems confessional to me, why there are even scenes of the child Lee Jr going to confession, confessing the sins of the child. “Absolve, absolve him.” This new book invites us into a dark wet cave where all the most exciting and painful things are happening all the time, awake and in dreams. Somewhere there’s a whisper, “sonny, hush, stop dwelling on it,” but the roar in one’s ears drowns out that quiet voice.

Published on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Tiresias-Collected-Poems-Leland-Hickman/dp/0982264518