Imprint: Les Figues
FORTHCOMING Summer 2026
In The Phonemes, Frances Richard investigates perceptually distinct units of experience, such as sounds, energy surges, and scraps of national and natural history, to create episodes of disruption and dissolution. Organized into sequences that move from seismic notation and wave-form typography to lyric encounters with meteors, snakes, glaciers, and the domestic sublime, the poems break[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 11/26/2025
Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice is a series of prose poems about the estranged self living outside of one’s native land and away from one’s native tongue. Romanian poet Alta Ifland writes first in French, then translates her work into English, before returning to the original French for further revisions, a process of linguistic reconciliation[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 08/22/2025
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 Fall 2026
2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not neatly correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text.[…]
Imprint: Les Figues
Published: 01/16/2025
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,[…]