Fonograf Editions

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.

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.

Ahmad Almallah’s third collection considers the impossible task of being a Palestinian in the world today.

When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong? In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, Celan among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.

Closely observed and slyly destabilizing, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a book of short fiction shimmering with mystery and menace. This surreal, precise collection unfolds in a world beyond conventional time and space. Concerned with theft, shame, exile, tourism, masochism, God, and “Nature,” these stories are lightly linked—objects, diseases, and landscapes reappear.
Gleason’s elliptical prose refuses traditional narrative logic, resisting easy resolution. Reminiscent of the work of Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, and Marie NDiaye, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a work of slipstream fiction that pulses with a sense of something generously withheld.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To say Harry Stables’s life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he’s been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he’s spent the last ten days in his dad’s falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father – now dying himself of cancer – has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he’s just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan – fishing guide, old friend of his father’s, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer – Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be. To say Harry Stables’s life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he’s been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he’s spent the last ten days in his dad’s falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father – now dying himself of cancer – has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he’s just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan – fishing guide, old friend of his father’s, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer – Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be.

According to George Saunders, “literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form” and so it is with Trouble Finds You, a modern-day Portis-like quixotic road trip replete with stumbling beauty and searing folly. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama. It is populated with characters – these men and their excellent dogs – who are sometimes frustrating, frequently stupid, often funny, but always full of life. Harry Stables bears more than a passing resemblance to the Coen brothers’ Llewyn Davis, a lovable curmudgeon committed to a quest of his own design.

We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.

The poems in We Sailed on the Lake are closely observed, finding unexpected affinities within urban and natural environments alike. As one poem states, “to cross the lake / you’ve got to make each step / pertain to the water,” and these poems explore relationality in many forms, moving from gentrifying cities to coastal beaches, from the sculptures of antiquity to YouTube searches, cataloging passing days “of which light is the measure.”

Alternating longer, occasionally narrative poems with short lyrics, this collection plays with time and ideas of promise, from youth to parenthood, noting how the self negotiates the artifices, be they technological or of self-design, that infringe upon reality and experience."

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, 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.