Bøger udgivet af Saturnalia Books

"Apocryphal Genesis comes as a reminder of how deeply personal an impersonal world can often feel. The failed promises of the previous centuries are mere preamble to the predicaments of the current one. Humanity's contentment to entertain the illusion of control over the world around us is also the source of our collective discontent. In Mossotti's poems, dark humor underpins every turn. His wit cuts through the bang and blab of what passes for polite discourse, and his visions are jarring and delightful in equal measure. His poems cinematically zoom from the exceedingly distant vantages of "telescopes scraping deeper into the womb / of the universe" to the microscopic "space between the whirl of electrons." While the ghost of Apollinaire guides the reader through these haunting poems, it's the poet himself who's on display more often than not (like a moth pinned inside a glass case), naked and unadorned. Apocryphal Genesis is a book that's mature enough to be unimpressed with the trappings of maturity. It's the first glance the poet's after, the subtle movement of stirrings under the leaf litter, and page after page, Mossotti transforms the cosmically divine into ordinary somethings we can find skulking about in our own backyards"--

"SO TOUGH cuts a loose and spaced-out path through the interpenetrated dreams of public, doomsday time and private, organic time. Written in a season of wildfire smoke punctuated by gunfire, grieving, and a child's questioning spirit, the book moves to the countervailing rhythms of household, eros, pleasure and charm, casting a wayward grin at the catastrophic comedy of our days. Though he's not really that tough, Jared Stanley rides elemental tones through "the desert roses, semi-wilted, wonderful, yellowed, well, you know / suffering to cover the suffering.""--

In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is "the self"? What is "the other"? And how to reproduce "one's self"? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body--or poem--malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body--or poem--attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral "we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate and ultimately refashion our pre-conceived notions of the self--and of life. Radical, uncanny, and stunningly original, The Engineers takes us on a journey to a place we've never been, but that is hauntingly familiar.

Translated from the French, Cutting the Stems is a playful, long poem in sections that contains a pastiche of various unlikely influences: manuals on gardening and plant propagation, etymological dictionaries, gemstone and mineral guides, a how-to for florists, and other "un-poetic" texts. Lalucq's poem incorporates word play, linguistic borrowings, and etymological references, and McQuerry and Bourhis's translation captures, and, at times, reinvents, that word play for an English audience. The poem includes the central personas she and he who at times talk past each other in lyrical and often surrealist exchanges. Through these personas, we see gender category, like language, as fluid. She, whose identity merges with the poem's speaker, is a florist and devotes much attention to the tending of words, to "[her] sentence," which takes on a life of its own. Cutting the stems of plants becomes akin to cutting away at language so that "the sentences bloom". Lalucq's poetry invites a questioning of poetic convention, foregrounding language's gaps and slippages. In this dual language flip book, the attention to language's instability is all the richer.

High Lonesome is a radio left on in a candlelit room, playing softly into the shadows as the hours fall through the evening. Interruptions of static, a slow confetti of grief drifting into the corners, mysterious white noise dispatches. Here is a meditation on estrangement--from an other, from the world, from the self--and its long aftermath spent learning how to cultivate tenderness and devotion in a world "where nobody / is tender enough," a practice that alternates between sorrow and transcendence. These poems are little ceremonies of attention to a variety of lonelinesses, both human and non-human. Strange, lyrical and funny, the third collection of poems by Allison Titus simultaneously reckons with and marvels at "the luminously borrowed / experiment that living is" in a world that feels terrible and hopeful, beautiful and precarious.

From action figures to alcoholism, mental illness to mortality, devotion to divorce, Before After interrogates yet celebrates the paradoxes of living in a world both beautiful and brutal – a world, according to these poems, in which Jesus texts random emojis from the cross, people suddenly sprout wings, human hearts are replaced by Platonic machines, and caskets are shrunk down to serve as symbolic trinkets. Along this journey through the real and surreal, the works of great poets – Hopkins, Plath, Lowell, and more – are lovingly subverted in the search for novel meanings that match this world. Written by a self-taught and award-winning poet, Before After challenges, with wit and compassion, our distinctions between thinking and feeling, sacred and profane, wellness and madness, before and after.

Gravity Assist, the newest collection by Martha Silano, masterfully measures the heights and depths of our earthly visions. Cerebral yet meditative, capacious yet focused, this book soars with investigations and ruminations, love letters, origin stories, and notes on gravitational forces both literal and metaphorical. Through her usual nimble style, Silano deftly weaves the humanistic and the cosmic, delivering a series of up-close and personal examinations of phenomena as far flung as copepods, nebula, trilobites, preening cormorants, or "e;Reaching out to soothe you, /the twisted arms of the last of three species of endemic /sea stars ripping themselves apart, arms crawling away in opposite directions, insides spilling out."e;

Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton's seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At the same time, in this book of mysteries, the cultivation of the redemptive energy of wit, in favor of the sensual and tender, performs as a means to resist violence.

Agudelo's books have always been concerned with the relationship between worker and consumer, whether in the kitchens or in the neighborhood, but in The Bosses, his spectacular third outing, Agudelo's sharp focus finally lands on the seen and unseen authority figures who dictate the boundaries of our lives, contemplating power structures from the current managerial culture to a historical exploration of the role that authority plays in our lives.