Catalog
Halal Pork and Other Stories, by Cihan Kaan
(cover art by Forrest Lucero, photo by Leyla Sevdiyar)
In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Kaan projects an avant garde, post 9/11 world, from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. It’s a place where Coney Island meets Mars; where hijabi girls are punk rock dervishes; where identity salesmen count pigeons at insane asylums as a cream cheese conspiracy brews in gitmo; where rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day; where the transgendered are holy; and where the bacon is halal. Kaan offers up five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn.
Born Palestinian, Born Black & The Gaza Suite, by Suheir Hammad
(cover photo by Tarek Aylouch)
UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad’s first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author’s preface, and new poems, under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher’s note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.
The Comeback’s Exoskeleton, by Matthew Rotando
(cover art by Gregory Ferrand)
“Incorporating the density of Spanish surrealism and a sprawling Whitmanesque line, this amazing first book finds Rotando engaged in a poetic biathlon which draws equally from maximal and minimal traditions. There are tight, economical poems, free verse forms derived from the sonnet, poems leaping about the page, but my favorites are the wonderful prose poems tumbling over and under themselves toward gnomish statements that feel both didactic and self-parodying.”
Tim Peterson, Since I Moved In (Chax Press)
Tim Peterson, Since I Moved In (Chax Press)
Theater of War: The Plot Against the American Mind, by Nicholas Powers
(cover art by Abdul Powell)
“In this detournement of political statements like the U.S. National Security Strategy Report, a reader will inquire when is “the truth” blurred; conversely, when does Powers’ alternative reading come painfully close to the real? The author’s hard-hitting, farcical longer-form poems might have constituted a part one, dissolving into the more empathetic, injured fragments. But his choreographed admixture embodies how emotions come. Anger interspersed with hurt; a loudly reinterpreted official voice, broken by still louder whispers.”
Bruna Mori, Derive (Meritage Press)
Bruna Mori, Derive (Meritage Press)