Section
New poems, sequences, and translations. Work that attends to form as a political and ethical question.
Beneath the polished surfaces of bourgeois commerce, the poem excavates a submerged history of colonial appropriation, revealing the warehouse as an archive of dispossession where the accumulation of commodities and the bureaucratic registration of human lives converge in a spectral geography of capital.
ReadDomestic life emerges here as an unstable archive of historical violence, where the banal residues of consumption, childhood, family memory, and everyday survival bear the inscriptions of war, displacement, and ideological power. Through abrupt juxtapositions and fractured recollections, the texts unsettle the boundary between private experience and collective history, revealing how the grand machinery of political violence penetrates the most intimate spaces of human existence, while fragments of tenderness and imagination persist as fragile forms of resistance.
ReadThe archive of war speaks through a politics of selective visibility: as language recedes into whiteness, the surviving words become fragments of an ideological and emotional apparatus through which private memory, imperial allegiance, and the moral economy of sacrifice are made legible. By exposing the violence of erasure as an aesthetic operation, the work interrogates the historical production of remembrance itself, asking whose voices remain audible, whose suffering is rendered peripheral, and how the intimate correspondence of individuals becomes entangled in the grand narratives of empire and war.
ReadA subtle disquiet permeates these poems, where ordinary gestures, fleeting perceptions, and fractured exchanges become sites of epistemological uncertainty, exposing the instability of memory, identity, and the narratives through which we recognize one another. Through an aesthetics of estrangement and oblique observation, the poems unsettle the authority of appearances and the transparency of language, tracing the fragile boundary between seeing and misrecognizing, intimacy and surveillance, truth and its endlessly deferred reflection.
ReadThe body emerges here as a contested archive in which the afterlives of slavery, the intimate violences of gendered power, and the historical dispossession of Black subjectivity are inscribed, resisted, and continually rewritten through the material force of language. Refusing the disciplinary grammars of racial capitalism and patriarchal intimacy, this poetry reclaims tenderness, desire, anger, and self-representation as practices of political agency, transforming writing into an insurgent act of recovering what colonial history sought to erase and what the present continues to render unspeakable.
ReadAn archive of the unlived emerges through folded images, spectral domestic spaces, and the unstable geometries of memory, where writing becomes an attempt to perceive what escapes the naked eye and resists incorporation into chronological history. Against the contemporary collapse of distance, these poems examine the permeability of the subject under the pressure of technological mediation, historical violence, and material existence, imagining perception itself as a contested terrain in which the boundaries between body and world, observer and observed, continually dissolve.
ReadEmerging from the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggles of Nicaragua and Latin America, Ernesto Cardenal’s radical reworking of the biblical Psalms confronts the alliance of military power, capitalist exploitation, and authoritarian rule that sustains the Somoza dictatorship and the broader machinery of Cold War militarism. By recasting sacred language as an instrument of political indictment, Cardenal exposes the ideological function of propaganda, the complicity of political elites in the preparation for war, and the obscene disjunction between official invocations of peace and the material production of violence, including the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. His poetics of resistance reclaims spiritual solidarity as a force against the dehumanisation of the oppressed, transforming the ancient Psalm into a revolutionary counter-discourse that refuses the sanctification of state power and insists upon the ethical indivisibility of faith, class consciousness, and liberation.
ReadMilo De Angelis’s poems inhabit the fracture between lived time and its retrospective construction, where memory, loss, and the instability of identity expose the failure of language to secure experience against disappearance. Through landscapes emptied of concealment and dialogues suspended between intimacy and estrangement, they articulate a poetics of historical belatedness in which the subject confronts the irreversibility of what has been lost, while the possibility of beginning again emerges from the precarious remainder of existence itself.
ReadMemory here behaves like a house with a hidden fracture: public images, family rituals, half-spoken warnings, and the stench of decaying money return as fragments of a past that refuses to remain past. Moving between the absurdity of television spectacle and the claustrophobic intimacy of inherited secrets, these texts trace how fear enters the body, reshapes perception, and becomes almost indistinguishable from ordinary life, leaving behind a haunting question about what we carry without knowing and what, even when unearthed, can never be made whole again.
ReadBefore meaning, there is the void: breath, phoneme, the blind materiality of sound from which both language and the speaking subject precariously emerge. Moving through prelinguistic memory, the corporeal genesis of the word, and the constitutive encounter between “I” and “you,” these texts dismantle the fantasy of language as a transparent instrument of sovereign consciousness, revealing it instead as a generative process in which bodies, identities, and worlds take shape through an endless, unfinished negotiation between sound and sense.
ReadFive poems: A Reel From Tarkovsky, Maestro, Oracle, High Priestess, and Hierophant. These poems approach the sacred, the oracular, and the mythological as contested sites of cultural memory, where inherited systems of knowledge persist as fractured forms of resistance to the disenchantment and instrumental rationality of the modern world. Moving between Tarkovsky’s post-industrial wastelands, the esoteric architectures of the tarot, and the precarious intimacies of poetic address, they imagine artistic consciousness as a collective practice of re-enchantment, capable of retrieving suppressed possibilities of being from the ruins of dominant historical narratives.
ReadThree poems: The Beast and Plato’s Theory of Forms, After Reading George Orwell’s 1984, and The Beast Refutes the Power of Language. The Beast emerges as the grotesque subject of a totalizing rationality whose ultimate ambition is to abolish every limit between thought and power, language and domination, the historical record and the sovereign fantasy of its author. Through a savage détournement of Plato, Orwell, and Derrida, these poems expose the authoritarian impulse at the heart of systems that claim mastery over reality itself, revealing how the desire to monopolize truth culminates in a regime of absolute self-reference where even the machinery of domination devours its master.
ReadFour poems: Sack of Symptoms, Civil War, Progress Report, and A Room. A name is spoken until it comes apart; address continues after listening has stopped. These poems anatomize the fractured subject as a site where the contradictions of social existence are internalized, reproduced, and rendered illegible through the unstable boundaries between self and other, body and language, presence and disappearance. Resisting the liberal fiction of an autonomous individual, Beckett’s poetics exposes identity as a precarious relational construction, while the failure of communication becomes symptomatic of a deeper crisis in the very categories through which subjects apprehend themselves and one another.
ReadAgainst the triumphalist temporality of capital, empire, and colonial modernity, Shimose’s poetry excavates the ruins through which history persists as material violence, sedimented memory, and the unfinished struggle over who may inhabit the future. Moving between the archaeological afterlives of stone, the lethal trajectories of objects, and the insurgent metamorphoses of vegetal life, these poems forge an archaeo-poetics in which translation becomes a redistribution of historical agency, implicating the reader in the very terrain where language, dispossession, and collective survival converge.
ReadFour poems: A Double Negative, Necessary Needs, Cycle, and Diagnosis: Hoarding. Their delirious assemblages turn historical materialism, revolutionary pedagogy, and the everyday debris of consumer culture into instruments of immanent critique, exposing a social order whose contradictions persist even in the most intimate architectures of the self.
ReadThe father’s body, still marked by the uniform of wage labor, becomes the point at which the ordinary world loses its continuity. The poem renders grief as a material rupture: the loss of another person is also the collapse of a future whose very possibility depended on their presence. Mourning emerges as the recognition of our fundamental interdependence.
ReadVigil Díaz (1880–1961) introduced free verse, the prose poem, and Vedrinismo into Dominican poetry.
ReadThe poems turn fractured perception, cultural memory, and the absurdities of everyday life into a poetics of formal instability. Through cracked mirrors, disrupted allusions, and linguistic play, they expose the contradictions of a world in which history, identity, and meaning resist coherence, while even the sacred becomes inseparable from the ordinary and the absurd.
ReadFive poems from the Mission Statement and Trojan Panopticon sequences break the sentence of management—hostages, algorithms, coverage, loyalty—until the line itself comes apart.
ReadFive poems from “Genius Foci,” the seventh series in the book Hilaritas Sublime (preverbs) (forthcoming, Marsh Hawk Press: 2027). A line stands back from the life it is already inside, and the thing—bird, stone, word—says more than it has to say.
ReadThe dreams of youth, the lists of fairness and justice, stand beside thunder, leaves, animals, and children. Through every turn the poem keeps one instruction: never believe, never trust, but never give up or give in.
ReadThree poems: Angel, Beaver, and Ni’ihau expose the island as an ideological machine where colonial violence, exclusion, and dispossession are transformed into myth, mystery, and picturesque lore. What looks like geography becomes a technology of power, revealing how history is buried beneath the stories we tell about place.
ReadPassage is administered so that conquest and the canon become one movement. The tariff marks every crossing; what it cannot price keeps a time of its own.
ReadFive poems: Midnight Hammer, Sizing Up Utopia, The Starter Cord, Larking in a Cafe, and Into the Arena.
ReadA late-night search for a rhythm section, a quarter note, and a haptic capotain.
ReadFive poems: Tale of Pearl-Grain Rice, Rescuing a Brother-in-Law, Picture This, No Ethnic Identity, and Deflation.
ReadFive poems: Herself, Ode to a Utility Infielder, Parting Such Orderly Sweet, From Nebula #46, and Evening | Toned | Wings.
ReadFour poems: Under My Umbrella, Musical Treetops, Valley Mist, and Low Spots.
ReadThree poems: Body in Total Time, For Alejandra Pizarnik, and Postscript to He Resigns.
ReadLetter to Rwanda, Lady-flute’s cantilena, In the palm of her hand, and excerpts from In Search of a Face.
ReadPoems from The Fecundating Dread Rotational Cluster, a Hinge kinetic densifying the particle ‘dread.’
ReadFive poems: On the Clock, Tweed Cap, An Olive or a Purple Haze, Emoticon, and The Making of Herdsmen.
ReadFive poems: Astronomical Winter, The Tongue-Cut Sparrow and Badger Teapot, The Last Hotel, Candy House of Compassion, and The Empress of Void Leads the Parade.
ReadFrom the forthcoming book So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain. Translated by Kurt Beals and Aimee Chor.
ReadWritten in 1920. A poem of the mob across history — from Gilead to Alexandria, from Rosa Luxemburg to Missouri.
ReadIn a dark hour, tasting the Earth — a poem of grief turned toward the ancient heart of the world.
ReadFour poems: the collapse of Kali Yuga, New India, the liberation of women, and praise of the Goddess of Learning.
Read