I recently watched a video in which Swedish pop icon, Robyn, cites “Arvet” by Bruno K. Öijer as a major influence on her own “Missing U.” And, indeed, a closer reading of “Missing U” reveals lines that are articulate echoes [...]
We proudly present the second installment of Action Books' N O I S E M A K E R S, a new monthly series that recognizes poets, translators, and poet-translators whose recently published work pushes boundaries, goes too far, to [...]
In homage to the dialogic motion of poetry and also to Gen X. Mixed by Olivia Lott Mixtape #1 is loss and warmth. Blood, veins, arteries. Faces, throats, wombs. Repetitions, questions, obsessions. Beside, beyond, behind, inside. One translation of contemporary [...]
1. My writing was always translingual, always on some level nonsense. When people ask me when I started writing poetry, I often say when I moved to the US – I began to translate song lyrics back and forth from [...]
I began reading Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal shortly after reading Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (transl. Ariana Reines). It was mid-February, precariously near the pandemic’s descent into our daily lives, and I had just returned [...]
“When you murdered me, I called it apostasy,” announces the speaker in Katy Mongeau’s debut collection Apostasy. With its “mutilated visions” of wicked lambs, apocalyptic suns, and homicidal lovers, Mongeau’s book marks out a harrowing territory between the corpse poem [...]
The below is one of several selections from two longer works written over the past three years. Our proposition, though, is too little or too obvious. Our thesis was/ is that literature can reveal the self to itself, that, like [...]
1. Whether on the page or as a poem-film, followers of Action Books really seem to love this poem by Bruno K. Öijer: we were the last to leave every party and we had nothing but our young faces the [...]
1. Last week I argued against the “gold standard” of the “voice that is great within us,” that stable interiority that necessitates and is necessitated by the dominant ideal of “communication” – or the direct contact between interiorities. And I [...]
poetry in action features work by poets from around the world, translated into English. It has three rallying cries: Poets of the world, unite and take over! Resist the oppressive constraints of good, publishable poetry established by mainstream literary venues! [...]