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While this year has been one of slowness in many ways, it was also the year we released one of my favorite books to have published: Theories of Performance by Jay Besemer! Jay’s poetry collection engages with issues of living in and through a queer, trans, sick/Disabled man’s body and examines the many ways we perform—a gender, out of expectation, in art. I find Jay’s work so thrilling—these poems know themselves, confident even as they share what is vulnerable, what is close to the heart and skin. They recognize the limitations of a body while creating its many possibilities: “I’m not broken down / into something with / or without parts,” he writes. “The / grammar here is a / unique body.”

Also, did I mention the animals? There are bear hearts and slick fish, huddled pigeons and mice, owls and badgers and hawks, the priest of hummingbirds and a green-shelled mussel and us, our very animal selves.

Get your copy via Lettered Streets or Small Press Distribution.

And check out the concept maps Jay created while drafting and shaping the book. The maps, helped him to draw connections and note themes throughout the process. Take a peek behind the scenes to see what the process was like and how the book evolved. He shares a bit more about the process of creating the book on The Kenyon Review.

Poetry Today is a series that celebrates poetics and aesthetics—the composition, look and feel of poetry for our time.

"If I could tell my very young self (and all newer poets) something, it would be that we have the right and permission to be poets, according to our own needs and the needs that we and our work discover together." -Jay Besemer talks with Ruben Quesada about his new book Theories of Performance and writing without fear on The Kenyon Review.

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A powerful writing prompt by Jay Besemer via Woodland Pattern Book Center's Prompts Against Anxiety: meditate on an archival or family photo to recover and reframe your ancestors' relationship to gender, race, white supremacist violence, or other personal/political topics. Find guiding questions and more.

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I shared about a few lovely / hard / needed books for Tarpaulin Sky Magazine’s “What I’m Reading” series.

Mini reviews of Syncope by Asiya Wadud (@uglyducklingpresse), Grief Sequences by Prageeta Sharma (Wave Books), 1919 by Eve Ewing (@haymarketbooks), Litany for the Long Moment by Mary-Kim Arnold (Essay Press), and Setting the Wire by Sarah Townsend (@letteredstreetspress).

#book review #micro review

Regret author Ryan Spooner responds in an essay to work by artist Sam Riesmeyer via The Martin gallery (TW: sexual assault).

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In the third installment, we speak with Jay Besemer, author of the forthcoming Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press).

Jay Besemer, author of Theories of Performances talks about the life-changing, perplexing, and most cherished books he's read (and more!) in the Nine Books About Your Life series via YIV Journal.

#nine books about your life #poetry

We're so excited about our next book Theories of Performance by Jay Besemer! These poems emerge from continued engagement with the issues living in and through a queer, trans, sick/Disabled man’s body. They explode the multiple valences of “performance”—of gender, of expectation, as a type of art—and the theories around them. Pre-order it now!

Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne, says, “Jay Besemer’s tensile lyrics palpate the many ambiguous and ambivalent spheres by which a person becomes known both to themselves and others—the public, the private, the domestic, the intimate, the bodily, the verbal."

And Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human, says, “Theories of Performance pulses with urgent jolts that lead us to consider the many ways in which we are always putting on a show. . . . along the way we revel in the sound poetry of the pharmaceutical industry, in the known and unknown territory that is our guts, our lungs, our feet, our brains.”

Jay Besemer is a poet/artist whose books and chapbooks include The Ways of the Monster (*KIN(D)/The Operating System, 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), Telephone, Chelate (both Brooklyn Arts Press), and Aster to Daylily (Damask Press). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Get a sneak peek at some of these poems in Jay's videos. One will be released each week until publication, so don't miss out and follow Jay on Twitter at @THEORIES_PER.

#poetry #newbooks #2020books #transwriters #queerwriters #newpoetry #writing on illness #disabled writer #trans experience

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Good quarantine reading and made me homesick. Get it from Madhouse Press.

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This book came about over tea on a sunny afternoon (perhaps all good books start so?) when I told David Trinidad how much I liked his previous book, Notes on a Past Life, and his vivid accounts of poets and writers in the 1980s and 90s of New York, a book made possible by David’s habit of keeping a journal. He thought he might have other entries about poets worth sharing, and then he thought of Jennifer Moxley, another frequent diary keeper, and so in this 2 chapbooks-in-1 volume, they each share entries from their times at writing conferences and programs in 1996 and 2010. In them, they run into old friends and meet new people, take notes on writing advice, and go for moonlit drives (these are poets, after all; the moon is observed ☺️) Diaries have an irresistible draw—so honest and detailed, curious in the mundane and often insightful. They give a peek into who people really are, hook us with their familiarity. “Before we are the poets we are meant to become, literary friendships prop us up and give shape to our ambitions,” writes Jennifer Moxley in her introduction to David’s side of the book, and this is why I’ve loved helping to make this a book: these entries invite me into a writing community when I don’t always feel part of a community (hello #quarantinelife), remind me of how writing includes times of not writing / of just being, and show how what we do and achieve is always interconnected—a line is inspired by someone else’s comments, a reading leads to an invitation, etc. And also, I’m so thankful that such interesting thinkers as Jennifer and David give us a peek into their lives.

Intrigued? Read more / order.

Sara Goodman’s Starfish begins in a polar vortex. The speaker lives in Chicago where, “The Northern Lights cast orange on a/network of lakes in Northern Finland.//Dip the entire thing/into an ice c...

“I don’t need to think about ‘queer visibility’ when I read books like Starfish, because gayness is like a polar vortex—all-encompassing with crystalline clarity, not an active storm, but very present. Queerness is right at home.” Freesia McKee reviews Starfish in Tupelo Quarterly.

In My First Visit to the University of Maine, Jennifer Moxley chronicles the 1996 National Poetry Foundation Conference on the 1950s, where she runs into several Language poets, cheers her partner on, and is inspired by panels on Edwin Rolfe and Thomas McGrath.

In Coteries & Gossip, David Trinidad records his week teaching at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program in 2010, hanging out with Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman, and taking notes on reading and writing advice:

0:08 – Vallejo residents are organizing a rally today to demand Solano County DA Krishna Abrams bring charges against the police officer who shot and killed Ronell Foster in February 2018, wi…

Sarah Townsend is featured on UpFront with Cat Brooks of KPFA (NPR) in Berkeley. Listen to her segment starting at 17 minutes.

"If there were a risk to me, it would be in not telling this story. And what harm we do to each other when we fail to describe the lived experiences of mothering and motherhood!" Sarah Townsend

"Connecting with my body made it possible for me to write: writing with pen on paper, taking my shoes off, closing my eyes, a swim in the late afternoon, the sound of my own breath." Sarah Townsend talks about writing through trauma, getting an MFA at 44, and hybrid forms at Literary Mama.

“Before we are the poets we are meant to become, literary friendships prop us up and give shape to our ambitions,” writes Jennifer Moxley in her introduction to David Trinidad’s chapbook. Our NEW Split Series Volume IV features a chapbook each from Moxley and Trinidad, who in diary entries from writing programs and conferences reveal the friendships, connections, and heroes who keep them writing. Read excerpts from each and then pre-order the book!

#newbooks newreleases nonfiction poetry nonfictionnovember smallpress mustread

Wesleyan University's twice-weekly student newspaper since 1868.

“Along the way, I became most interested in voice and intimacy: How close can we get to the reader or how as a reader can I be impacted by a narrator?” The Wesleyan Argus highlights Sarah Townsend’s discussion of Setting the Wire.

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IT’S YOUR NEW SPD POETRY AND NONFICTION BESTSELLERS!!! Featuring Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Noemi Press, Letter Machine Editions, Dorothy, a publishing project, Tolsun Books, KERNPUNKT Press, & more!

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Excited to see Setting the Wire on this bestselling list!!

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