“looking can’t be felt but / sound” — Fred Moten’s latest book is an inter-sensory and polyrhythmic exploration of how to say what and why. The poems collected in Perennial Fashion Presence Falling mobilize Black vernacular, dense punning, and ulterior cognitions to address Moten’s primary concerns: “social movement, aesthetic experiment, and black study,” as well as the overlay of culturally- and personally-specific sites of meaning.

Tom Comitta’s new release is ambitiously simple: a novel with narrative thrust, plot, drama, rhythm, etc., though entirely void of human presence. The book is also—curiously, provocatively—non-written; constructed out of quotations about the natural world from three-hundred different texts, The Nature Book is a kind of polyphonic collage which imagines—or, perhaps, anticipates—the landscapes of the post-human. Comitta’s project abjures E.M. Forster’s claim that human nature is the novelist’s ultimate and necessary preoccupation, reorienting the Earth’s matter and matters as absolutely primary, rather than mere human ambience. 

I’m impressed by the potency and dexterity of imagination and language in Lisa Fishman’s World Naked Bike Ride. Each story in this collection—published beautifully by the unmistakable Gaspereau Press—is its own self-governing island, each its own ecosystem of sense and sound. Often building up and out of error—a misremembrance, a dislocation, a lost object, a misspeak, a halving—Fishman’s narratives do away with the usual movements around victory, accrual, and possession, paying attention instead to contingency, circularity, and the peculiar particular.

I, like many others, first came to know Bob Kaufman through his extraordinary poem “The Ancient Rain”. Kaufman, among the co-founders of the Beatitude journal, once undertook a vow of silence from the time of JFK’s assassination to the end of the Vietnam War, and—though it is a pleasure to take in his output on the page in this collection—Kaufman’s work is really best encountered aloud as his political actions, his compositions, and his thought occurred primarily in the oral/aural mode. 

I have a bad habit of reading out of season. The 2018 Nobel Prize winner’s sprawling, gnostic, historical epic is likely as wintry as it gets, and yet, this summer, it will accompany me to the beach. 

Later this summer we are to receive a collection of Simone Weil’s poems and autobiographical writings, translated into English for the first time. Weil’s thinking and writing, to me, represent the acme of attention; we need her now more than ever.

Dalkey Archive has been putting out some top notch reissues in their Essentials series—including Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down—but I’m especially excited for their new edition of The Tunnel by William Gass, an old favourite. Keep an eye out, too, for The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein, due out in March of next year, which has perhaps my most dearly loved opening passage: “Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.””

Recommended to me recently by someone with immaculate taste, my interest in Brad Fox’s The Bathysphere Book was cinched by this wonderful piece of historical animation in The Public Domain Review. An excellent read for both the seabound and landlocked.