Published: 11/06/2024
Elements of this book, Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes, defy reason. They do so for good reason. Much of what we do, much of what we think, is oblation: sacrifice, offering, to something or someone. The root of “oblation” is “to draw near” or “to dwell in.” It refers to what is brought unto the altar,[…]
Published: 10/27/2024
When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork,[…]
Published: 10/16/2024
What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In The Ruins of Solitude, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes of[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 10/05/2024
There are one hundred kinds of Chinese silence: the silence of unknown grandfathers; the silence of borrowed Buddha and rebranded Confucius; the silence of alluring stereotypes and exotic reticence. These poems make those silences heard. Writing back to an “orientalist” tradition that has defined modern American poetry, these 100 Chinese silences unmask the imagined Asias[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 09/28/2024
To fight the gods—you must first become a slave. Our universe is dead. All that’s left are memories. But the powers indigenous to the new world are fighting back. Alexander, a handsome immigrant fleeing trouble in his poor native land, doesn’t even have a claim to his own name in the magic-rich city of Norio,[…]
Imprint: Uitgeverij
Published: 09/14/2024
Where does your voice come from? The one you speak with, or the one you read with? What does it sound like when you read, silently, to yourself? There are the first influences, or at least the ones that first come to mind. But you quickly admit that there are others as well. The voices[…]
Published: 09/06/2024
In The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators, Zamler-Carhart impersonates the 12th-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena as she comes out as trans and tries to write her father’s imperial biography, The Alexiad, while in exile in contemporary West Africa. Outside the Empire,[…]
Published: 08/06/2024
In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful seeks to unsettle notions of[…]