Latest Playlist
Basic Needs
Playlist by Vanessa Jimenez GabbThese excerpts from my second poetry collection, BASIC NEEDS (October 26, 2021, Rescue Press), explore and report on capitalist existence, the ways in which labor informs and alienates the self. These poems believe that love, then, is a most radical act, a way to survive and defy as we await the inevitable. —Vanessa Jimenez Gabb
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Featured on October 18, 2021
A Symmetry
Playlist by Ari Banias“If every book of poetry, from now until the end—or the terminal twisting—of time, were to offer itself as a field guide to the apocalypse by attrition in which we are living, in which we are forcing each other to live, then I would nominate Ari Banias’s A SYMMETRY to be among the books that we consult first. In its clear and capacious inventory of the inter- and codependence of what feels like the fullness and failing of all things, Banias’s poetry is transcribing a kind of vigilance that is mournful yet magnetizing, altruistic yet self-adhesive, and always enflowered by the daily uprising of new manifestations of love.”
—Brandon Shimoda, author of THE GRAVE ON THE WALL
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on October 11, 2021
about:blank
Playlist by Tracy FuadTracy Fuad’s about: blank powerfully explores languages driven to the margins by our inexorable march towards progress. She chronicles the Kurdish ruins that evidence occupation or the evolution of words like buttons that can describe the domestic to weapons of mass destruction. She elegizes the exile of our sentient bodies in this anthropocene era of digital capitalism. Her monostix lines are glitchy content streams, haunting as they are present, deadly funny as they are deadly serious. Fuad’s poetry is absolutely unsettling and breathtaking.
—Cathy Park Hong
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on October 4, 2021
Sousveillance Pageant
Playlist by Radiator PressEmily Abendroth's SOUSVEILLANCE PAGEANT is a hybrid work that coasts restlessly between the categories of poetry, novel, and nonfiction essay. The text's primary figure, whose name is also Sousveillance Pageant, functions not only as an individual character but as an unruly and deviant guiding principle, who desperately longs to be guided by others in turn. If surveillance describes that which watches from above (be it the state, the police, a financial institution, or a private data tracker), then sousveillance describes that which watches from below (fixing an unflinching but also quixotic and wandering eye upon the nature of power and its mechanisms). This book asks: what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we as humans cannot live without, and what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we cannot possibly live with (or which make life unsurvivable)? One inimitable encounter and discomfiting event after another push the Pageant to consider what constitutes security or safety, under what conditions, and for whom. In the words of historian Dan Berger, "SOUSVEILLANCE PAGEANT is our abolitionist avatar, our determined alter ego marshalling collective wisdom against the punitive surveillance state with an ingenuity all her own. Follow her rebellious spirit."
The selection included here comes from the book's second-to-last section, titled "A Biometric Drubbing.
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