Fonograf Editions

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.

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.

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

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."

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.