Imprint: Les Figues
FORTHCOMING Winter 2024
Fantasy, fear, and freedom all play a part in A Story of Witchery, a book-length narrative poem by Jennifer Calkins, and newly illustrated by Thor Harris. Here we meet Emily, our “small and weedy” protagonist, an orphan complicit (perhaps) in her own abandonment who is caught up, as poet Amy Gerstler writes in her Introduction,[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
FORTHCOMING Winter 2024
In Lividity, poet Kim Rosenfield works within the outskirts of language, draining it of connotation and excess. Using words and phrases culled from linguistics textbooks and language-learning manuals, Rosenfield invites the reader to experience the everyday vernacular as dislocated affect. What happens when language acts as organ donor? When language, the conveyor of our vulnerability,[…]
Published: 09/12/2023
The Way Things Go contains a mix of poetry, art writing, and life writing about anticipatory grief, or mourning someone or something before it’s gone. Each successive chapter in the book decreases in length by exactly one sentence, from a 71-sentence-long opening chapter, to a 70-sentence-long second chapter, to 69 sentences, 68 sentences, and so[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 09/21/2023
Proposed as a collection of imaginary logos for the corporate sponsors of Borges’s Library of Babel, Kern balances on a precipice between the visual and nonsensical, offering poems just out of meaning’s reach. Using dry-transfer lettering, Beaulieu made these concrete pieces by hand, building the images gesturally in response to shapes and patterns in the[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 07/20/2023
Stitching together a post-apocalyptic history from the scraps of fairy tales, war memorials, hunting songs, and disparate scholarship, Jessica Bozek’s The Tales traces the violence that humans inflict upon one another. As the central narrative of the Lone Survivor becomes revealed through the mouths of various perspectives, Bozek investigates the language that victims and perpetrators[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 08/03/2023
After stumbling upon a wooden box containing a complete set of miniature wax mold figurines of US presidents at a flea market, artist Alex Forman began photographing each little man, minus their pedestals. Presented for the first time in book format, Forman’s elegant black and white portraits are accompanied by brief biographies composed entirely of[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 05/25/2023
The before, the after, and the event that divides. In Irradiated Cities, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai’s lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 04/13/2023
Delving into the fissures of language as an opportunity to create something new, Rosenfield appropriates texts from various fields of knowledge (evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis, advice on the science of living, and feminist theory) to rewire ideas of authority, subjectivity, and expert opinion. The resulting re: evolution is part text-book, part poem, part song-of-science, part feminist[…]