BLACK RADISH BOOKS  publishes innovative books of poetry and hybrid writing! Here is our current catalogue of books. Click links to find out more about our books and purchase! Follow Black Radish Books on FaceBook and Twitter

 

Our Weather Our Sea
Samuel Ace
Black Radish Books, 2019                                                        Poetry. “Sam Ace’s fourth collection reads, brilliantly, as a new and selected—even though these poems are fresh and just-here. This is because the book travels through so much of what we love about Ace’s work: an intergenerational and sexually fluid map fashioned by a transgressive tenderness that seems to always-be-heading-somewhere. In this way, these poems are culminations towards a queer futurity. ‘I beg you to stay unformed,’ Ace writes, with what is now his classic voice, both a determined command and compassioned plea. For Ace, whose work and presence now spans decades of activism, lives and genders, this collection honors them all as a site of inquiry, community and, ultimately, celebration in the face of uncertainty. Bravo, maestro. Thank you, brother.”—Ocean Vuong   read more

PRE- Barbara Tomash Black Radish Books, 2018 Poetry. All language is a game played in and through relation. PRE- takes seriously the playful question— what happens to language when words think for themselves?—and attempts to make that impossibility possible. By ingeniously uncoupling prefixes from their stems Barbara Tomash divorces ordinary words from their workaday labor of denotation. New and unforeseen thoughts form relationships in the gap after the prefix and its hyphen—“meaning, a small cavity, an inner space.” Indeed, we emerge from each of these meticulously notated poems as from the interior space of meditation: to a renewed faith in how we make meaning of our relation to the world....” read more

GO WITH ME Jared Hayes Black Radish Books, 2017 Poetry. A Religion & Spirituality. Relentlessly playful and celebratory, go with me meditates on life with young children, holding one’s beloveds close, making art, embracing the death of a mentor—the proximate contiguous to the infinite, all and nothing, one and the other. Hayes sketches his lyrics against the canvas of interstellar space, the frame against which all else is known—mountains, rivers, wind, Disneyland—”a radical dispossession” wholly immersed in the immediate pleasures and discomforts of daily life. Joyous, even in the face of death and loss, go with me revels in presence: “this ravine and this gulley this runnel this other river another river this letter,” this litany of loves neither punctuated nor constrained, present ‘mid the plethora....read more

ANYJAR Jaimie Gusman Black Radish Books, 2017 Poetry.“What’s the ANYJAR? I think it’s a space where anyone keeps loss. Or it is itself loss, but it’s also the jar you make to store loss in. When you are building what you are simultaneously trying to understand, it’s easy to get stuck in it, because the Anyjar isn’t separate from you. It’s hard to get a grip on how memory holds absence in its clear walls. But Jaimie Gusman, in this moving, slippery, smart, ambitious book, cracks the problem open.” —Catherine Wagner...read more

FORGET IT Anastacia Renée Black Radish Books, 2017 Poetry.Anastacia Reneé’s FORGET IT draws the reader into the churning seas of dissolution — marriage, family, identity, livelihood — in language unknotted from the constraints of punctuation, syntax, sense— “eaten into seedless cherries”—and plunged into the fabular scape/scope of dreams, myth, fairytales, faith, race. Phantom births, ghosts, half-grown children, sex, betrayal, violence, anger, female body, the bloody aftermaths of dissolution sprawling, placental and umbilical, in the urgent, haunted language of dreaming and memory. City and speaker dissolve into one another, boundaries vanquished. What remains after dissolution? Talking to herself. From whence do (k)new form(s) arise? A “revelatory hymn”, matrix upon which self and sense are (re-) configured as her own, Anastacia Reneé’s FORGET IT dances on the grave of the lost—fiery tempest, a phoenix of language and presence. When we wake up, nothing is forgotten...read more

PLAYING THE FORM James Maughn Black Radish Books, 2017 Poetry. In PLAYING THE FORM, James Maughn continues his exploration of the intersections between poetry and martial arts. This is a poetry of haptic resonance, built around the three sections of the Yang Family Tai Chi long form, and grounded in daily lived practice of poetry and Tai Chi. PLAYING THE FORM engages with form as dynamic process, and seeks new ways to engage in and with the world that are at once fluid and solid, playful and political, deeply rooted and always in motion…. read more

ELSA: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Angela Veronica Wong Black Radish Books, 2017  Poetry.Women’s Studies. Angela Veronica Wong’s ELSA unfolds the story of a fictional 18th-century French demimondaine and mistress of Louis XV. Meditating on gender, identity, and the precarity of women’s lives against the scrim of patriarchal power and capital, the foils of the sonnet form and storytelling shape Wong’s critique. Both adhering to and breaking the strictures of rhyme and meter, much as Elsa wears and divests herself of corset and panniers, Wong’s sonnets shift between the politics of the French court and the streets of New York, the poems navigating the shoals of female embodiment, as we slip between then and now, narrated and narrator. Her beauty a discipline alternately wielded by and against her, “Elsa is droll they say / Elsa is a doll. Elsa is a hole / inside you put your secrets….'” read more

ANEMAL UTER MECK Mg Roberts Black Radish Books, 2017 Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. “Mg Roberts’ ANEMAL UTER MECK defies category at every turn. Here we are repeatedly being reborn into different forms as we heal our severed wings and fly. Our new body inhabitations are woven with scars and our every encounter with meaning is eroticized. Are we the so-called alien forming the foundation of the real or an impossible unicorn creating new rituals for a world that awaits us? These poems are where a constant ‘hallucination of presence’ adds origins and ways to being monstrously and divinely human. ...read more

IT’LL NEVER BE OVER FOR ME Mark Lamoureux Black Radish Books, 2016 Poetry.“WStyl(us)istically innovative, Baudelairian, ballsy and deliciously infectious as a record you want to lay the needle on again and again, reading Mark Lamoureux’s exhilarating and moving prose-poem/poetic-prose ‘album,’ IT’LL NEVER BE OVER FOR ME is a teleportive experience: time-traveling you back to land smack in the middle of the lover’s knot of city streets that forget as fast as they lay you out, flat on your face for a night on the town—a lover’s knot wrung out of Mods and Motown, strung out on speed and stay, Detroit to Manchester, the US and UK “...read more

Where they would never be invited Jesse Nissim Black Radish Books, 2016 Poetry.“Jesse Nissim writes: ‘I am freely quoting a fantasy for less. / I call it a capitalism of the low roof, it is located / along the river with the continual pay per view.’ Jesse Nissim’s poems burn with a hard, gemlike flame; they call on us to become better and better and seeing and thinking and feeling. ‘I heard the suburbs found likable our business. / I dream of persons and pets. A family of staircases / measures space.’ How to be alone (how to be most alive), how to be with others (how to be most alive). “...read more

Hunter Monies Jen Tynes Black Radish Books, 2016 Poetry.“Jen Tynes’ HUNTER MONIES is a tracking expedition. I find myself hooked on a voice, and I wander behind it. It echoes and distorts. It turns corners, and I hurry after it, and, only after catching it, do I realize the corner was a horse, the horse, a jar, the jar, a slaw or a bloodletting or a flea market emptied out after a busy morning. This is a world simultaneously strange and familiar. I hear talking and realize I’m been eavesdropping and try to figure out what I’m listening to: a voice consulting with itself, a voice talking to a corpse it refuses to admit is dead?”...read more

the meshes Brittany Billmeyer-Finn Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry.“THE MESHES is a creative four-part record of the author’s imaginative engagement with the films and aesthetics of the late Maya Deren (1917-1961). Across the poetry, prose, polyphonic performance, and polyvocal bibliography contained herein, Billmeyer-Finn’s use of language is immediately evocative of the compelling images and salient issues inspired by Deren’s oneiric, choreographic, and nonfiction films.”…read more

CANT David James Miller Black Radish Books,2015 Poetry.“CANT is an evocative soundscape of verbal cues that propose ways to go beyond a semiotic account of phenomena. This immersive score brings into existence sustained listening zones where diachronic difference and sonic concatenation are finely tuned to the subtlest frequencies. David James Miller’s arrangement of tone clusters evokes auditory dimensions that hover between the specifics of attention and formless”…read more

Orphan Machines Carrie Hunter  Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry.“In ORPHAN MACHINES, Carrie Hunter stages a kind of cyborgian theater where ideology is brilliantly dismantled to unmask the real. With each startling construction, spaced across aerated pages or set in tight prose blocks, she discovers a form of liberation struggle. Her subjects—philosophy, sexuality, sociality, music—always interpenetrate, because it is life that is at issue, and life is mixed up.”…read more

Luci: A Forbidden Soteriology j/j hastain Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry.“j/j hastain’s Luci is the most seductive devil I’ve met in some time. A queer devil, she must learn to know her cursed body in all its mercurial forms—as black hole, cave lip, letter, fatty winged-thing, beauty, ravisher, mass of genres, thirsts, and images.”…read more

a game of correspondence Valerie Witte  Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry.“In her astute new book, Valerie Witte investigates correspondence as both an act of communication and the prospect of communion; her poems are suffused with the necessary haunting of these urgent impossibilities, a kind of animal, a kind of seizure. Witte interrupts her smooth surfaces with gorgeously jagged punctuation, stuttered cadence, animate line breaks, and deft leaps”...read more

Electrical Theories of Femininity Sarah Mangold Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry. “What does it mean to be a poet in the age of smartphones, big data, and microblogs? Sarah Mangold returns us to an earlier disorienting era—of gramophones, manual typewriters, and hand-cranked telephones—when sound and facts also traveled too far, too fast. She thinks through and with that modernist moment as a means of providing insight into the ‘astonishingness’ of the twenty-first century”...read more

A House Without A Roof Is Open To The Stars Mackenzie Carignan Black Radish Books, 2015 Poetry.. “In A HOUSE WITHOUT A ROOF IS OPEN TO THE STARS, Mackenzie Carignan’s poems make their way into the reader’s consciousness by way of scrupulous perception. Carignan’s acuity creates a vision of the world that the reader trusts even as it proves itself strange, eccentric. ‘Spectacle and skeptical,’ she writes, ‘they both come from a speck / a fleck / a flicker a sliver / of what we see.’...read more

Tax Dollar Super Sonnet, Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet Nicole Mauro Black Radish Books, 2014 Poetry.“Featuring one giant ‘super’ sonnet of text from presidential speeches (Obama to Washington) and prose poems using Sarah Palin’s autobiography, Going Rouge, and Emily Dickinon’s Books”...read more

Dear Jack Jill Stengel Black Radish Books, 2013 Poetry.“In this collection of short poems, some only a few words, Jill Stengel has written a large book in psychological scope and emotional depth…read more

Caddish Susana Gardner Black Radish Books, 2013  Poetry. “CADDISH mourns dishonorable modes of historical masculinity by celebrating our slutty embodiment in a studied poetry that is hyper-literary,…read more
DISCLOSURE Dana Teen Lomax BlBlack Radish Books, 2011 Poetry. In the age of data mining and identity theft, Dana Teen Lomax’s DISCLOSURE has been called“the new memoir.” Recently anthologized…read more
Gaze Marthe Reed Black Radish Books, 2010  Poetry. In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, GAZE explores the resulting…read more
Herso An Heirship in Waves Susana Gardner Black Radish Books, 2011 Poetry. “I don’t know another poet so formally daring. Rebellious curlicue and lace significant: the pages gleam with pleasure, finesse and audacious …read more
Infinite Variations Marci Nelligan Black Radish Books, 2012 Poetry. Composed from source-text randomly selected from On the Origin of the Species and the Old Testament, INFINITE VARIATIONS seeks… read more
Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children Dana Teen Lomax, Editor Black Radish Books, 2013  Poetry. Drama. Young Adult Fiction. KINDERGARDE: AVANT-GARDE POEMS, PLAYS, STORIES,…read more
OCCULTATIONS david wolach Black Radish Books, 2010 Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the “courage of paradoxical evocation.” For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that …read more

Sonja Sekula : Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir Katrin Schaeppi Black Radish Books, 2011 Poetry. LGBT Studies. Art. “‘I love words—to me writing is drawing.’ So says artist SonjaSekula. And so it is in her hands…read more

Spectre Mark Lamoureux Black Radish Books, 2010  Poetry. “Lamoureux’s disturbing and often distinctly American landscapes explore the interface between fantasy and fatalism, magic and machine. In the…read more

The Arakaki Permutations James Maughn Black Radish Books,  2011  Poetry. “In THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS, James Maughn continues his uncompromising engagement with the catechisms of martial kata and their intersection …read more
The Dead Love: Hands and More Hands Together Jared Hayes Black Radish Books, 2012 Poetry. “I understand Jared Hayes is conducting here a deep spelunking into connected caverns of other texts. What I don’t yet quite grasp is how …read more
The Incompossible Carrie Hunter Black Radish Books, 2011 Poetry. “Every once in a while there’s a collection of poems that cancels my way of thinking for a better way. Carrie Hunter’s THE INCOMPOSSIBLE…read more