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Savage Pageant
Playlist by Jessica Q. StarkSavage Pageant recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, Savage Pageant reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.
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Featured on September 14, 2020
Katabasis
Playlist by Eulalia BooksLucía Estrada’s Katabasis is a three-part plunge into darkness, madness, the unknown. It takes its title from the Greek word, which, in the classical tradition, refers to knowledge quests into the underworld by epic heroes. Estrada’s katabatic poetics unearth a new take on descent and, with it, dissent: descent into mind-states and dream-states, descent into the intertextual and uprooted, descent into a trauma unique to a life lived in active or dormant warzone, dissent from a US imperialist vision of Colombia and its cultural production. Rendered into English by Olivia Lott, Katabasis is the first poetry collection by a Colombian woman to be translated into English and published in the United States.
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on September 7, 2020
Falsehood
Playlist by After Hours EditionsWe move through so much of life without a witness, I want Emily Brandt to be mine. Falsehood is a collection of everyday interactions and not normal situations that the world likes to call normal. And just when I thought no one was paying attention, here comes Brandt, she’s been absorbing and collecting the unacceptable norms built by the patriarchy all along. The result is Falsehood, a fierce translation and actualization of so many moments we assumed we were alone with. Brandt’s poetry is like a feminist sleeper cell, easing us out of isolation for a laugh before continuing our lifetime sentence of talk therapy and EMDR. Thank the goddess and the witness! —Sini Anderson, Director of The Punk Singer
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on August 31, 2020
Pricks in the Tapestry
Playlist by Birds, LLCThis book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect—I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode. —Jameson Fitzpatrick
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