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Named one of 75 Notable Translations of 2024 by World Literature Today

The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A Whale is a Country explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.

Named one of 75 Notable Translations of 2024 by World Literature Today

The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A Whale is a Country explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.

an identity polyptych is a multi-part, multi-genre experiment that explores familial estrangement, identity as a mixed-race Black person, and movement towards reconciliation. It can be considered a memoir. The book works to find peace, even if it feels next to impossible. It keeps in mind the trickiness of memory, the effects of trauma, the necessity and constant work of healing, and an unfulfilled wish to feel a true sense of belonging.

The book begins with a question rendered as a statement: “I do not know when reconciliation comes.” This statement haunts the text in order to serve as a bookend, rendered as an echoing set of ellipses. When Coleman was writing this book, they did not know how to tell their story (let alone if they should), and like the echoing sets of ellipses in the text, they’re left—even after much personal work—with so many questions, and so many things left unresolved.

Their desire for reconciliation and healing shines throughout. This book—the author’s first—honors the first steps of healing. The first is to find the words for, and to name the things that ail us so that we may continue on.

This prose-poem sequence opens with the following sentence: “Scenes left on the cutting room floor flower into their own scenery.”

Such an auspiciously suggestive start functions as a distillation of the book’s prismatic echo chamber, where painterly lyricism and narrative probing converge within each musically astute sentence. This is a symphony of partial happenings, ghostly movements, and investigatory ruminations, a stroll through an exhibit of paintings that seem to stare back at the viewer: captivating, gorgeous, and just a little bit scary.

In their hybrid debut collection Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.

Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.

In their hybrid debut collection Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.

Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.

Any future film director planning to make a movie of Myles’s iconic novel Chelsea Girls (it’s always just about to happen) would be wise to read Bird Watching first. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, the central character of the book is a twenty-something that is already filled with memories. Living in New York City, resplendent, full of both grandeur and awkwardness, they are about to embark on a life fully invested in art. Bliss happens, as does uncertainty. Everything is here and now.
The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho’s Boat, the other collections contained in the volume, comprise the first three books that Myles published, when their promise as one of the most important writers of their generation was just coming into view. Immensely readable, raw, and slightly unhinged, the poetry that comprises these three texts is post young. Slight creaky but fully functional, all of these poems are beautiful and funky.

Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry contains a critical foreword by poet and scholar Rosa Campbell, along with a preface by Eileen Myles contextualizing the book within our contemporary moment.

Any future film director planning to make a movie of Myles’s iconic novel Chelsea Girls (it’s always just about to happen) would be wise to read Bird Watching first. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, the central character of the book is a twenty-something that is already filled with memories. Living in New York City, resplendent, full of both grandeur and awkwardness, they are about to embark on a life fully invested in art. Bliss happens, as does uncertainty. Everything is here and now.
The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho’s Boat, the other collections contained in the volume, comprise the first three books that Myles published, when their promise as one of the most important writers of their generation was just coming into view. Immensely readable, raw, and slightly unhinged, the poetry that comprises these three texts is post young. Slight creaky but fully functional, all of these poems are beautiful and funky.

Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry contains a critical foreword by poet and scholar Rosa Campbell, along with a preface by Eileen Myles contextualizing the book within our contemporary moment.

Any future film director planning to make a movie of Myles’s iconic novel Chelsea Girls (it’s always just about to happen) would be wise to read Bird Watching first. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, the central character of the book is a twenty-something that is already filled with memories. Living in New York City, resplendent, full of both grandeur and awkwardness, they are about to embark on a life fully invested in art. Bliss happens, as does uncertainty. Everything is here and now.
The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho’s Boat, the other collections contained in the volume, comprise the first three books that Myles published, when their promise as one of the most important writers of their generation was just coming into view. Immensely readable, raw, and slightly unhinged, the poetry that comprises these three texts is post young. Slight creaky but fully functional, all of these poems are beautiful and funky.

Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry contains a critical foreword by poet and scholar Rosa Campbell, along with a preface by Eileen Myles contextualizing the book within our contemporary moment.

An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination. stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black American contributions to world art, the seed of innovation that never dies.

What becomes of a history overwritten, sampled, celebrated and smeared? How do we find creation past erasure? Part new media archive, part visual poetry project, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] is a journey into highs and lows of Black America’s first global music export. Taking biographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a jumping off point, BIRD/DIZ jumps between actual erasures of the written/oral history of Bebop, redacted poems taken from those words, and reflections on historic performances from some of jazz’s chief characters. From St. Louis heroin dins to Copenhagen sound

An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination. stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black American contributions to world art, the seed of innovation that never dies.

What becomes of a history overwritten, sampled, celebrated and smeared? How do we find creation past erasure? Part new media archive, part visual poetry project, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] is a journey into highs and lows of Black America’s first global music export. Taking biographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a jumping off point, BIRD/DIZ jumps between actual erasures of the written/oral history of Bebop, redacted poems taken from those words, and reflections on historic performances from some of jazz’s chief characters. From St. Louis heroin dins to Copenhagen sound

The 25th-Anniversary Edition of DEBT, the National Poetry Series Winner and debut poetry collection by Mark Levine. With a new introduction by Srikanth Reddy.

"The velocity of these poems will induce motion sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine's aerial acrobatics always return us, largely intact, to common ground. It might even be sacred ground. For all its existentialist pratfalls and murderous chicanery, Debt is a profoundly elegiac work, from its dedicatory epitaph to the final poem's darkling closure. Our heaviest debt, the most timeless poems remind us, is to the historical dead."--Srikanth Reddy, from the new introduction

Winner of the 2023 BUNNY chapbook contest, Katie Naughton’s Debt Ritual sees debt as intensely private yet nevertheless significantly interconnected with global financial systems and other systems of power.

Naughton’s text is interested in the way that what appears as money is often funded by debt, while also taking into account the role of art, something that offers social capital without the accompanying wealth. Debt Ritual sets up an equivalence between money and participation in the world and then works to destabilize it. Sized as a dollar bill, Naughton’s book considers the ritualistic use inherent in money and debt and wonders how and if the ritual of art-making replicates -- or interrupts -- the rituals of finance.

Winner of the 2023 BUNNY chapbook contest, Katie Naughton’s Debt Ritual sees debt as intensely private yet nevertheless significantly interconnected with global financial systems and other systems of power.

Naughton’s text is interested in the way that what appears as money is often funded by debt, while also taking into account the role of art, something that offers social capital without the accompanying wealth. Debt Ritual sets up an equivalence between money and participation in the world and then works to destabilize it. Sized as a dollar bill, Naughton’s book considers the ritualistic use inherent in money and debt and wonders how and if the ritual of art-making replicates -- or interrupts -- the rituals of finance.

Detonated Mirror is a hybrid text of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest, a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, while at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. It is the place of aliens, the atom bomb, scorching sunlight and rough, bony terrain -- that is, it is a place where conspiracies, warfare, and the story of humans, animals and the earth collide in exceptional ways.

The poems explore, in a visionary context, the explosive and prismatic slippages on the perceived borders of self, lover, land, animal, and consciousness. Sparse, rhythmic pieces share space with prose poems that explore the narrator’s “secret body”. These, in turn, share space with horror-disorderly-anarchistic poems, which buck at the underside of lyricism and playfulness with unhinged rage and obsessions with the grotesque inner/outer aspects of body and sex/sexuality. Ultimately, the poems are grounded in paradox and sublimity, and the sometimes magical, ultra-sensory quality of encounters across the spectrum of bodies, beings, and landscape.

Fonograf Editions’ first ever magazine FE builds off the genre-defining work it has released since 2016.

FE includes new material from Catherine Bresner • Suzanne Buffam • Arda Collins • Joel Craig • Michael Earl Craig • Corinne Dekkers • Mark Anthony Cayanan • Anaïs Duplan • Claire Donato • Peter Gizzi • Yam Gong (trans. Dorothy Tse and James Shea) • Brandi Katherine Herrera • Emily Hunerwadel • Federico Italiano (trans. Brenda Porster) • Krystal Languell • Nathaniel Mackey • Veronica Martin • Kristi Maxwell • Joyelle McSweeney • Ryan Mills • Alice Notley • Alexis Orgera • Gabriel Palacios • Andre Perry • Justin Phillip Reed • Joshua Pollock • Harper Quinn • Rachelle Rahmé • Megan Savage • Zach Savich • Mary Szybist • Nick Twemlow • Jan Verberkmoes • Jeffrey Yang and CL Young.

Fonograf Editions’ first ever magazine FE builds off the genre-defining work it has released since 2016.

FE includes new material from Catherine Bresner • Suzanne Buffam • Arda Collins • Joel Craig • Michael Earl Craig • Corinne Dekkers • Mark Anthony Cayanan • Anaïs Duplan • Claire Donato • Peter Gizzi • Yam Gong (trans. Dorothy Tse and James Shea) • Brandi Katherine Herrera • Emily Hunerwadel • Federico Italiano (trans. Brenda Porster) • Krystal Languell • Nathaniel Mackey • Veronica Martin • Kristi Maxwell • Joyelle McSweeney • Ryan Mills • Alice Notley • Alexis Orgera • Gabriel Palacios • Andre Perry • Justin Phillip Reed • Joshua Pollock • Harper Quinn • Rachelle Rahmé • Megan Savage • Zach Savich • Mary Szybist • Nick Twemlow • Jan Verberkmoes • Jeffrey Yang and CL Young.

FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION moves between histories of gendered violence, and the struggles against it, to argue for a notion of freedom as liberation and autonomy: the dream of a world without work, without money, without gender, while imagining forms of survival now for those who often have little to no choices, refuse to submit to the demands of tedious underpaid or unwaged labor, an abusive partner, or seek a life beyond work. Sex work is not a “better” type of labor, but a proposal for its abolition. Rather than marginalize the lives and deaths of sex workers as a site of titillation or disgust, Freedom & Prostitution looks at the freedom that sex work can allow, while addressing the dangers sex workers face that are not necessarily inherent to sex work, but to the violence of capital and the deeply ingrained misogyny and racism in the world today.

Whether it is militaristic, imperialistic, or carceral in nature, the violence women face in sex work or their intimate relationships, are intrinsically linked by the force of capitalism and its capacity to shape and impoverish everyday life. Looking specifically at the case of Gary Ridgway, or the “Green River Killer” who murdered over 49 prostitutes during the 80s in the Pacific Northwest, and the response by sex workers, which influences and inspires the various moments of resistance embedded within the text.

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, “Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace.” Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period : Notebooks, 1998–2007 would like to be something more interesting. Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes.
The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it. Kunin’s grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.

The winner of the 2023 Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize contest, as chosen by Srikanth Reddy, Groceries is a book-length poem about what to do about objects. On earth everyone is worried about objects—getting them, naming them, maintaining them, destroying them, getting rid of them. Some people say objects will be the end of life on earth. Other people say objects will save us, if we get the right ones.

But as we reckon with these object-mediated futures, we live on an earth full of the stuff itself: fax machines, horseshoes, waves. Groceries is a guide for what to do about these objects—how to speak to them and how to listen for a reply.

The winner of the 2023 Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize contest, as chosen by Srikanth Reddy, Groceries is a book-length poem about what to do about objects. On earth everyone is worried about objects—getting them, naming them, maintaining them, destroying them, getting rid of them. Some people say objects will be the end of life on earth. Other people say objects will save us, if we get the right ones.

But as we reckon with these object-mediated futures, we live on an earth full of the stuff itself: fax machines, horseshoes, waves. Groceries is a guide for what to do about these objects—how to speak to them and how to listen for a reply.

Half of What They Carried Flew Away is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, somewhere between concept and place, sometime between primordial and the everyday. Or it is scripture, yet to be consecrated, telling of a group always at the margins, peripheral, transitory, and engaged in a migration one might sense abstractly – “a material that reorders the shape of a room” – but will never define absolutely. Even when Rexilius’s speaker discovers “official definitions of who they are,” the reader is no closer to any such conclusions.

It’s in these embodied contradictions that Andrea Rexilius’s text shines. Here is a difficult and disorienting record of characters, and the impossible facts of their existence. Here is a history, fractured and disparate. Here “is a landscape, it has a beginning. It fastens and unfastens from top to bottom.”

In this anarchic, post-genre poem-as-novel, imagined by one of Canada’s leading experimental writers, the dystopian politics of our everyday inhale both a contra tenor opera singer who lured to China by the Kanadian embassy and the innocent cultural attaché who invited him. kHarLaMoV’s aNkLe: a utopian fantasy leaks us bits of poetry and counsel, while in its bowels the rumble of utopia rises. It is the unrelenting spasmodic energy of a group of revolutionary junkies of Montreal known as kHarLaMoV’s aNkLe, who work to free not just themselves, but us all.

The characters of kHarLaMoV’s aNkLe are never singular. They are communities of agitated endeavor, alive (we won’t call it “living”) in a dystopia so all-encompassing that even the conditions and conventions of punctuation and capitalization are shattered. This fascinating novel invokes Kathy Acker, and Roberto Bolaño, too; the kinetics of David Foster Wallace; and the sentence-long novels of José Saramago. But the ANkle goes further, as it doesn’t just use but survives grammatical convention, wresting words back from the death doctors of order, and making them, and us, believe in the world again.

Winner, 2025 Firecracker Awards Winner in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance—and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson’s powerful memoir, Low—selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions’ inaugural essay contest—tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, “Low’s provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator—while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Winner, 2025 Firecracker Awards Winner in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance—and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson’s powerful memoir, Low—selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions’ inaugural essay contest—tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, “Low’s provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator—while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Winner, 2025 Firecracker Awards Winner in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance—and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson’s powerful memoir, Low—selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions’ inaugural essay contest—tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, “Low’s provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator—while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Clark Coolidge, in reference to his own poems, writes, “We are accustomed to regard words in only one way—as vehicle. My experiments invite you to regard words as an object—or more exactly, as an organism, with patterns of existing that are specific to itself, inexplicable and marvelous.”

More Radiant Signal, by Juliana Leslie, is a book of poems with patterns of existing, both inexplicable and marvelous. Like Coolidge, Leslie regards words as an object, as an organism, as structural units apart from their typical semantics. And in this way, Leslie builds, poem by poem, an alternative poetic literacy—idiosyncratic and highly self-aware—that prioritizes the tangible.

These poems exist in a category somewhere between mathematical proofs and textual sculpture. Either way, every page offers a unique composition: things to be figured, felt, weighed, measured, but never interpreted. (Interpretation is too removed, requires too many middlemen.) “You are the textual orange / between presence and absence” Leslie writes, interpolating radical sensation into a pair of familiar abstractions. Yet it’s the four preceding lines—of the poem “Unknown Quantity”—that mark the true engagement of this work: “How many ways to exist? / I don’t have a pencil / as if I could write this / I can’t even think.”

Sonic and typographic experimentation collide in this book-length poem in seven sections. MOTHER IS A BODY is a visceral and immediate exploration of the female body, and that which is continually forced upon it, as Herrera considers what it means to be mothered, and to mother in return.

Through a cyclical process of imagining, conceiving, assigning, emptying, MOTHER IS A BODY at once renounces and reveres the notion of the sacred feminine, to illustrate “mother” in her many actualities — a complex figure, at times unsightly, that both is and isn’t what we most often ascribe to her as an archetype of the divine.

Overseen by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Clarice Lispector, Miriam Medrez, and Yoko Ono, Herrera pieces together material excavated from within Instagram’s endless scroll, Wikipedia’s citations, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s archives to create a layered inscription — musically, emotionally, philosophically — to the idea of motherhood, and the children she never had.

Sonic and typographic experimentation collide in this book-length poem in seven sections. MOTHER IS A BODY is a visceral and immediate exploration of the female body, and that which is continually forced upon it, as Herrera considers what it means to be mothered, and to mother in return.

Through a cyclical process of imagining, conceiving, assigning, emptying, MOTHER IS A BODY at once renounces and reveres the notion of the sacred feminine, to illustrate “mother” in her many actualities — a complex figure, at times unsightly, that both is and isn’t what we most often ascribe to her as an archetype of the divine.

Overseen by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Clarice Lispector, Miriam Medrez, and Yoko Ono, Herrera pieces together material excavated from within Instagram’s endless scroll, Wikipedia’s citations, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s archives to create a layered inscription — musically, emotionally, philosophically — to the idea of motherhood, and the children she never had.

No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale is the debut collection by the Athens-based poet, Helen Dimos. The co-organizer of the annual Paros Translation Symposium, she hosts a twice-monthly English-language radio show, peopletalk, at the Athens art center, Beton7. Dimos has chosen the following quote as emblematic of the contents of this book:

I’m surprised you exist. But actually surprised, no poetic incredulity
Your existence is so good

when you are away your realness slips through me

You write and two hands
scoop under my lungs invisible hands enter my body

Jessica Laser’s debut full-length collection of poetry

There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly broken down in tears of joy in front of the state council, trying to read aloud a commendatory letter from the sovereign that began, “Sergei Kuzmich! From all sides rumors reach me…” Those not involved in falling in love at the party laugh, appearing involved in this gossip, but, as Tolstoy describes it, “no matter how indifferent or inattentive to them they seemed, the feeling for some reason was…that the anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich, and the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and all the power of attention of the entire company was directed only at this couple.”

Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides takes a poem to be a kind of pretense, an “anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich,” the thing we say when we can’t talk about being in love. And we can never talk about being in love, because, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says, “it is not the kind of thing that can be known (it isn’t information).” These poems aim to reach beyond information—to speak from where Sergei Kuzmich leaves off—in order to give voice to the kinds of experience that, to become knowable, require the pretense of art.