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.

Little Neck is a feverish and hypnotic excavation of grief and inheritance, told from the naïve perspective of a girl abandoned in a cemetery as she unearths her sinister family history. Haunting and cinematic, Dennigan's second novel is set in a small New England town steeped in secrets. It follows the life of a girl who grows up tending graves under the guidance of a beloved groundskeeper. Her world unravels when he catches her exhuming a body, and she is sent to apprentice with the town's tombstone carvers. As the girl learns fragments of her hidden past, a dark family history begins to consume her. Little Neck explores themes of inheritance, desire, and grief, probing the question: Can we escape the mistakes of our parents, even when their identities are a mystery? With echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Marguerite Duras, and Marie Redonnet, Dennigan crafts a tragic, darkly humorous meditation on family and the secrets that shape us.

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.

A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief. At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In her ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from the diasporic arts of memory and survivance.

It’s a month, a year. Wander, tramp, escape, trespass: people have every reason under the sun—and no reason at all. In new syntax and a fitful sense of the poetic line, The Green Lives finds joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand. It opens in familiar signs (safehouse, railroad, dog) that are made strange in their service to warn or welcome. In its turn, a reversal of place emerges where no marker will be left: an example of yellow petals, a thousand miles of strip malls, air filling with dust, glitter, and sulfur. Ever receptive to beautiful intrusion, so fast, Gilmore reckons with the infinite.