Poetry | UpsetPress

December 12, 2020 | Books, Featured, News, Poetry, Spotlight 3 Comments (6) |

Coming Soon: Faraj Bayrakdar

Hunger Strike
In the last part of night
of blood and memory
in the last neigh
of empty stomachs
the human tree reveals
its prophecy
and pours forth our meager
stature

Tadmor 1989

In 2002—just after 9/11 and prior to the US invasion of Iraq—a group inspired by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s seminar on Arab prison literature decided to collectively translate Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar’s collection A Dove in Free Flight. Smuggled out of prison, the poems were published in Beirut without his knowledge, as a means of publicizing the poet’s plight as a political prisoner, and exerting pressure on public opinion to pay attention to his case. A French version, translated by the great Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laabi, himself a former political prisoner, followed.

More than fourteen years after the initial completion of the project, UpSet Press presents this extraordinary poetic, human, and historical document, featuring an introduction by editors Ammiel Alcalay and Shareah Taleghani, a preface by Elias Khoury, and a lengthy interview with the poet himself following his release on November 16, 2000, after thirteen years, seven months, and seventeen days in the Syrian carceral archipelago.

We present Elias Khoury’s introduction here, along with a selection of Bayrakdar’s poems, translated by the New York Translation Collective: Ammiel Alcalay, Sinan Antoon, Rebecca Johnson, Elias Khoury, Tsolin Nalbantian, Jeffrey Sacks, and Shareah Taleghani.

_______________________

Beautiful and intensely emotional, Faraj Bayrakdar’s songs of memory, love, heartbreak and yearning are a testimony to the transformative power of the imagination. The Syrian prisons where his poems were written remain places of torture and violence. Yet during his long years of incarceration, the poet captured the elusive bird of freedom in poems smuggled out and published in Beirut and France without his knowledge, words that went on to inspire the Syrian revolution. The impressive collective of translators, writers and critics behind this first collection of Bayrakdar’s poetry in English were inspired by Elias Khoury’s seminar on Arab prison literature at New York University, and the explosive nature of this literature in a country as closed as Syria. In an interview accompanying the poems, Bayrakdar reveals, “… captivity and freedom … enfold in themselves a charge that does not fade, not for the reader and not for the poet.”
Malu Halasa, co-editor of Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, and author of The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, and Mother of all Pigs.

_______________________

Faraj Bayrakdar’s poems, written while in prison, are a glorious testament to the power of the imagination and memory. Every page in this magnificent, important book is proof of how “language at the peak of clarity/unfolds the night,” how it transcends time and space to create its own kingdom, one where justice and love reign. Those searching for the right words to describe these turbulent days, and to offer hope, will find them here. Bayrakdar is a voice we must listen to, and this is a book that all of us must read.

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

_____________________________

These searing and openhearted poems, born in prison, scrawled on cigarette paper, smuggled out from Assad’s repressive rule in Syria, and now finally translated from Arabic into English, make a fresh contribution to thought as much as to poetry. This thought is conservative in that it protects and preserves a poetics that live on under oppressive conditions. How rare it is to experience pride in being human in contrast to the depravity we have increasingly paraded in public. The prisoner, in mourning for life while that life continues outside, is the keeper of a buried treasure, thought itself and a bit of paper.

Fanny Howe, poet, novelist, and, most recently, author of Night Philosophy and Love and I.

November 24, 2020 | Art, Books, Collaboration, Featured, Poetry, Spotlight 1 Comments (0) |

New Release: The Infected Nucleus

The Infected Nucleus :: Art by Daniel Cordani + Poetry by Robert Booras

The Infected Nucleus is about “the self” pulling itself apart, battling and then ultimately accepting its solitudes, its struggles, the variable infections of its conditions. What results is not triumphant, but transformative. The Infected Nucleus adopts the creative act as an analeptic response to living within systems of normalized cruelties. It’s offered as an artifact of defiance against the bubbles of self-delusion and denial, apathy and hatred. A curious offshoot from a polarized world of binaries. A cohesive salve formed between two artists Daniel Cordani and Robert Booras fortifying themselves against the jarring madness.

ISBN is 978-1-937357-84-9.
Publication date 2020

8.25 x 11.5
60 pages Paperback & Vellum

Daniel Cordani has received a BA in Psychology from University of Delaware and an MA in Art Education from Brooklyn College. Through his multidisciplinary approach, he has exhibited work in galleries since 2000. In addition, he has remained active in the art community by facilitating art workshops, creating video projections for the Haiti Cultural Exchange, donating paintings to hospitals and desiging art for independent music labels. Daniel began his mission of art as a tool for raising social awareness with the video “Evolutionary Threshold” which was premiered at the Newspace Gallery in 2005. He continues to develop work in an urgent voice that addresses environmental and humanitarian concerns.

Robert Booras received a BA from the University of Michigan, a MFA from Brooklyn College, and a MSEd from Baruch College. He is the creator and editor of S.P.A.W.N (Sunset Park Art & Writing Newsletter), co-founder and managing director of UpSet Press, as well as a higher education professional and advocate for students. He is the author of The New Night of Always (2016).

The Infected Nucleus

August 21, 2018 | Asian American, Books, Featured, News, Poetry, Queer Poetry, Spotlight, Women's Poetry 4 Comments (0) |

2018 New Release: Vanessa Huang’s “quiet of chorus”

Vanessa Huang’s quiet of chorus bears witness to an intimate terrain traversing pasts, presents, and futures within and surrounding political movements to end various embodiments of the prison industrial complex in the 2000s, California, and beyond. Making refuge in diaspora, the poems in quiet of chorus inhabit and transform the poet’s languages of heritage and migration into their own call-and-response syntax, inviting readers and listeners into prayer, pause, novel gesture towards freedom.

“quiet of chorus lifts up the often muffled lineages of resistance to normalized state violence in contemporary life. Huang’s embodied poem-worlds stoke our yearnings for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.”
—Morgan Bassichis

Excerpt from this gorgeous debut book of poetry:

Gaza waterprayer
–after Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”

Dear human body,

You do not have to be good or bad.
You do not have to pray angelic,
veil each thousandth tide this dying body.
You only have to let each shrivel
loosen and tell what it tells: fire from the air, fire from the sea.
Love me, shrivel to shrivel, as I’ve loved each unwanted red flower.
Meanwhile each cell of child in bodyprayer.
Meanwhile each fold my ocean still swell
awash such jail amassed through years, the terror each backlaw
bone grown brittle, dry from such weeping.
Meanwhile the quiet dust of sage and cardamom
still speak to the restless ones, the wild now resting in my heart.
Meanwhile we all are returning home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
the trailing paper you condemn or praise, how ill the restless imagination,
it calls to you, swimming my waters, still wild in love’s embrace—
over and over announcing return:
simple prayer of each living thing.

Vanessa was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange for her poetry manuscript, quiet of chorus, which has been described as a project that “lifts up the often muffled legacies of resistance to genocide in contemporary life” and home to “lifeworlds that yearn for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.”

quiet of chorus

June 16, 2017 | Asian American, Books, Featured, Iranian American, Poetry Like Comments (0) |

Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus by Amir Parsa

A unique and striking fusion of poetic prose, philosophy, and stylistic acrobatics, Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus is a theoretical, mythopoetic work that uses various narrative and dramatic techniques and devices to fashion a new genre, one that is engaged with critical discourses even while it reads like a fantastical and labyrinthine story. First published in Paris in 2000 in its original English along with a suite of Parsa’s multilingual works, this bold and hallucinatory text depicts the path of writing through the deployment of a group of anonymous wanderers and a constantly metamorphosing ‘I’. With its constant reframing and reformulations, its changes of rhythms and tones, its manipulation and treatment of textual unfoldings, Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus uses the parameters and the dynamics of the reading experience, along with mythological and intertextual explorations, to construct an ingenious and beguiling treatise. The book continues to defy convenient classification and tackles, through formal and stylistic innovations, the very possibilities and limits of literature and its potential for offering new visions of the world—and new relationships to the world.

COVER BLURBS

Parsa takes us directly into the manufactory of language, the wars and revolutions where words are taken apart, their bits and pieces reassembled, here comically, there monstrously, everywhere frantically… Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus: Parsa’s own epic, a melding of the philosophical and the poetic, the legendary and the theological, that generates not a tractatus but a tractatüus, a vagrant genre wandering in between a dead language and one yet to be born, is a product of a total war.

From the afterword by Gregg Horowitz, Chairperson, Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, and Author, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life

Amir Parsa: the polyvocal defiance of the subject. His, ours, everyone’s. The polylocal embracing of not/being there… He writes for a tomorrow that will never come because ‘arrival’ is no longer among its illusions. The vertiginous gusto of his narrative is the reeling roll of that future as we can only imagine to hear it now. He seems to be teaching us how to fly—with words. His, if anything, is a post-national read, a post-categorical writing, a post-immigrant thought. He is post about anything and everything.

—Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, and Author, Close-up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future

Few writers make more interesting globular dynamics than Amir Parsa. Under Parsa’s influence, the punctum of the pen yields islands invisibly connected beneath the water. Seen from the surface, apparently self-contained and isolated, but underneath, secretly linked in the shifting sands of a coastal shelf. Viewed from one perspective as wounds in the water, viewed from another as the beginning of healing: both views are like memory or history. True artistry emerges from and results in such perspectival shifts, allowing design and accident their ineluctable due.

—Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, University of Southampton, Author, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Editor, Baudrillard Now

About Amir Parsa

Amir Parsa was born in Tehran in 1968 and moved to the D.C. suburbs when he was ten. He went to French International schools both in Iran and in the U.S., attended Princeton and Columbia universities, and currently lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. An internationally acclaimed writer, poet, translator and newformist, he is the author of seventeen literary works, including Kobolierrot, Feu L’encre/Fable, Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition, Erre, and L’opéra minora, a 440-page multilingual work that is in the MoMA Library Artists’ Books collection and in the Rare Books collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. An uncategorizable body of work, his oeuvre—written directly in English, French, Farsi, Spanish and various hybrids—constitutes a radical polyphonic enterprise that puts into question national, cultural and aesthetic attachments while fashioning new genres, forms, discursive endeavors and species of literary artifacts. His writings in both English and French have been anthologized, and he has contributed to a number of print and online publications, including Fiction International, Textpiece, Guernica, Armenian Poetry Project and a mash-up issue of Madhatters’ Review and Bunk Magazine. His translations include Bruno Durocher-Kaminski’s And They Were Writing Their History, and the first two books of Nadia Tueni, which appeared under the title The Blond Texts & The Age of Embers. Since 2007, pieces and fragments from Parsa’s ongoing The New Definitely Post/Transnational and Mostly Portable Open Epic as Rendered by the Elastic Circus of the Revolution have been featured at The Bowery Poetry Club and The Riverside Church, during the Uncomun Festival, the Engendered Festival, and the Dumbo Arts Festival in New York, and at the Baroquissimo Festival in Puebla, Mexico, among other venues. This literary work is comprised of cantos and fragments constituting an on-going plurilingual epic that unfolds over time on various platforms, in multiple arenas and spaces (private and public), and through various scriptural strategies—from the traditional (handwritten sheets and books) to the new (electronic, web). In June 2010 at the Paris en Toutes Lettres festival and in conjunction with the publication of his book-length poem Fragment du cirque élastique de la révolution, he put into action The American in Paris is an Iranian in New York, a 10-hour multiplatformal ‘scriptage’ taking place throughout Paris, with fragments being simultaneously projected at the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance during the Artstroll Festival in Manhattan. He has instigated his unique encantations, readations and bassadigas, and conducted more traditional lectures, workshops and playshops, on avant-garde poetics, literary/artistic innovation, and cultural design at museums and organizations across the world, including Norway, Mexico, Italy, France, Brazil, India and Spain. His curatorial interjections, conceptual pieces, artistic interventions, and critical educational praxis have taken place in a host of public spaces, organizations and environments. As a Lecturer, Educator and Director in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Education from 2004 to 2011, he developed programs, curricula, and learning experiences for a wide range of audiences. He also conceptualized and created the ongoing PinG (Poets in the Galleries) series at the Queens Museum in 2007. He has taught at Columbia, the University of Girona in Spain, and the University of Maccerata in Italy. Formerly a Chairperson and Acting Associate Dean at Pratt Institute in New York, he currently teaches at Pratt, where he is an Associate Professor and directs trans/post/neodisciplinary initiatives.

Excerpt:

And in Baabol, every night, a new tower, unlike the others but bearing an uncanny resemblance to its predecessors, sprouted in the place of the old one, razed to the ground the day before. ‘Six nights, six towers!’ exclaimed one, ‘seven nights, seven towers,’ exclaimed another! They had put into motion the question of their own death, and all was born again, constantly written, constantly traced…

The dilemma, however, was not resolved. Baabol contemplating its withering had rejuvenated itself, and now, as I remember translating the words of one, for they resonate still in my own mind, now that I myself have left Baabol, reluctantly I must add, but with all of its memories relentlessly, restlessly, clamoring through me – I shall not relate my manner of escape from Baabol, although that also would make quite a tale for the tale-teller, quite an epic for the poet! – I recall the words spoken, how the young one asked: ‘And now must we each night raze the new tower to the ground?’ The muted spectators, the muted masses, I also mute: and a silent awe echoed through Baabol, throughout Baabol, known of course, as the wondrous silence, of Baabolians.

But no one dared propose otherwise: again and again, again and again, endlessly alive, Baabolians each night razed the tower that had grown among them the night before: the towers of Baabol each night swerving from the ground: never the same tilt, never the same, unfinished, jagged-edged, endlessly windowed, the strength of an ancient monument each time: at the edge of this city, far away in the distance of all my cities, always: the Towers of Baabol…

May 22, 2016 | News, Photo, Poetry 1 Comments (0) |

UpSet Press News: Zohra Saed on Langston Hughes: Lost & Found Series V Launch

June 11, 2015 | Asian American, Books, Featured, News, Poetry, Reviews, Women's Poetry 4 Comments (0) |

A Nuclear Family by April Naoko Heck

News From UpSet Press:

A Nuclear Family by April Naoko Heck

“Read these poems and trust this history.”— Kimiko Hahn

UpSet Press is pleased to announce the release of A Nuclear Family, April Naoko Heck’s debut book of poetry.

homework help

As we approach the 70-year anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Heck’s timely collection explores the brink of creation and annihilation — the dawning of the nuclear age and the shaping of Japanese American identity within the shadows of WWII.

On August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima prefecture, Heck’s great-grandmother walked in a field 2.5 miles away from the blast’s epicenter. Meanwhile, 20 miles away, in the town of Otake, Heck’s mother was in the womb of her mother, presumably safe from the impending nuclear fallout.

Drawing from conversations with family members and historical research, Heck traces the footsteps of her great-grandmother, and then turns her attention westward to her literal nuclear family in poems about her Caucasian American father’s job at a nuclear power plant, as well as his later illness and passing.

As Kimiko Hahn discerns for us, “Plain horror courses beneath the surface of many of these poems — and that intensity issues from the history we know and the history we could not know because A Nuclear Family really is a poetry-memoir. And such a collection makes me realize how without art, we only have dry records. With April Naoko Heck’s poetry, we now have the burning horse, white light and black rain, a skull pulverized for medicine, a hundred Canada geese, the Ponce de Leon Motel, a frozen lake. And where horror subsides, there is a lovely tranquility. Read these poems and trust this history.”

A Nuclear Family (ISBN 978-1-937357-91-7 / $11.95 / March 1, 2014) is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Family-April-Naoko-Heck/dp/1937357910/.

Born in Tokyo, April Naoko Heck moved with her family to the U.S. when she was seven. Her poems have garnered an AWP Intro Journals Award, Academy of American Poets Prize, and Allen Tate Memorial Award, among other honors. Her writing appears in publications including Alaska Quarterly Review, Artful Dodge, Asian American Literary Review, Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Collagist, Cream City Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and Shenandoah. A Kundiman Fellow, she has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She currently works for the NYU Creative Writing Program.

Please contact nuclearfamily@upsetpress.org for review copies, interviews with the author, and to set up readings and/or classroom visits.

A Nuclear Family

REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS:

The Los Angeles Review of Books

From 1945 Japan, the book moves inward, examining Heck’s own nuclear family, experiences as a Japanese-American, and her father’s job at a nuclear power plant. The word “nuclear” is at once reminiscent of a family ravaged by war and the family as a social unit. Heck excels in juxtaposing horrific imagery with moments of simple language: “After years, she would still hold up her hands / and flutter her fingers to describe what she saw, / pale blue light dropped to the sky, / Kira-kira, she said. Twinkle, twinkle.” Bookended by violence—World War II and ten years after September 11, 2011—A Nuclear Family is a story of survival, what it means to be a daughter, and how to tell the stories we inherit. The book opens with the searing image of “fistfuls of silver / sewing needles fused / together eyeless,” and ends with the instruction to “Open your eyes.”

Review by Ansley Moon

Late Night Library Interviewed by Amanda McConnon

Here is an excerpt:

AM: Another the part of the book that deals with your father, your life together, and his death, accesses a tender side of the voice that isn’t as present throughout the rest of the book. How was writing about this subject matter different than writing the poems about Japan?

AH: Thank you for noticing that. I think the difference is in the magnitude and quality of grief I feel over these losses. I didn’t know my great-grandmother except through stories, so I don’t feel the same kind of tenderness toward her as I feel toward my father. That emotional distance is helpful in being able to control language. I often feel I don’t have enough control when I’m writing about my father because the grief is so much closer to the surface. I think tenderness is probably both an asset and a liability in poems: you need just the right amount to court but not indulge in sentimentality.

AM: In the untitled poem after “The Bells” you write about your great-grandmother describing the blast from the atomic bomb by saying “’Kira, kira,’ she said, ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’” Not only did you have to toe the line of sentimentality, but also worry about making atrocities too beautiful. How did you approach your subject matter with this responsibility in mind?

AH: This is a great question because it gets to the heart of how powerful and essential, and yet problematic, poetry of witness can be. Some people will argue that making atrocity that is beyond language somehow consumable, digestible through art, actually makes it all the more possible for atrocity to reoccur.

I can see that the poem includes beautiful language, but I think the primary drive and essence of the poem is really about the heartbreaking innocence of her phrasing, the way she must have told the story to herself. I think that may be the vocabulary she had, the language that was true to her personality and experience: to her, the bomb falling actually twinkled. And I trust readers to “get” that the poem is more about her unreplicable experience than about beautifying language for poetic effect.

Luna Luna Featuring Book Excerpt

What impressed me about this poetry collection was not only Heck’s use of imagery, but the way she gets to the heart of the matter. She shows the reader how pain is measured at different times in our life. Sometimes, pain surfaces as loss, as a strained father-daughter relationship. But, it is also a way to keep ourselves.

I admire the way Heck aligns past versions of herself and past versions of places; this collection surprised me as it is not only a collection rooted in family and history, but also one rooted in identity and the search for happiness.

In “The Leaf Book,” Heck discusses a third grade leaf-book project and in discussing school, and her father, she also delves into self-identifying. I love that line, “I know the wrong kinds of love…”

Leah Umansky

Vida Conversation with Purvi Shah

PS [Purvi Shah]: I love this idea of fruition even in years to come, because when I think back to myTerrain Tracks book launch, one of my college poet friends, Gabrielle Civil, an amazing performance artist, read as well as Kundiman co-founder, Sarah Gambito. Similarly, you had an amazing book launch for A Nuclear Family with so many voices of people who had influenced you or whose writing you admired, and I love that sense that poetry is not just a home for us individually, but is a shared, collective home. And if we can see our writing as a small way of saying, “We have voice, we have stories to tell, we take up space in this world,” we can also feel how powerful it is to do so in camaraderie. I think about how our writing pulls in our ancestors, these lineages, and simultaneously we are creating the next lineages for people to branch off from.

ANH [April Naoko Heck]: That’s part of what Kundiman taught me – there’s a level of book-learning that is simply limited and you have to experience a creative life viscerally and exchange energy with people who are living their poetry in a way you realize you want to and can. Kundiman validated that for me. Any form of creative learning has always been inextricably connected to my identity, the hardships and triumphs of my community, as someone of mixed race, a woman, descendent of war victims and survivors. And that’s not true for every Asian American female writer. That’s just my truth.