Imprint: Les Figues
FORTHCOMING Spring 2025
The Ants is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, The Ants is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the exposé of[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
FORTHCOMING Winter 2025
Requiem by Teresa Carmody is a “folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life,” writes editor and author David Ulin in his Introduction. In this short collection of fiction, a lonely man plainchants for the waitress he once stalked, a sonless father serenades a fatherless son, and a bereft family gathers to bury a parent,[…]
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: Les Figues
Published: 06/06/2024
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
Published: 05/08/2024
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,[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 03/14/2024
Someone has taken a trip and taken photographs of that trip and someone else has been invited to watch a slideshow of the trip taken. There is a road, there is an abstract painting, there is a viewer who wishes he could live in a televised loop of a sunset, and another who wonders why[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 01/29/2024
The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse[…]
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[…]