Argos Books is an independent literary press, founded in 2010. We publish poetry, hybrid work, translations, and collaborations.
Beyond excited to announce that I Love You and I’m Not Dead by Sade LaNay is finalist for the Lamda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry! Congratulations Sade!!
https://www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/current-finalists/
Announcing the 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalists, selected from more than 1,000 book submissions by over 300 publishers
What kinds of errant crystals has Sade LaNay placed upon their throat to make these polyvocalities so audible? So that from the violated archives of Black history, LaNay makes a clearing for a fugitive chorus — poets, organizers, librarians, educators, reverends, —who refuse to negotiate on the prisms of Black life. I Love You and I’m Not Dead requests your care and attention without promising anything in return: clarity, closure, reconciliation. If, as LaNay articulates, the afterlives of chattel slavery are made intimate in the trauma of everyday enfleshment, Black femme languaging, Black femme imaginative labor might be a space to configure radical kinships across time. Who can be ready for the brilliance in these pages, for the “demonic grounds” the book insists upon, for the trajectories LaNay’s poiesis has carved out and to which we must now attend?
–Jennif(f)er Tamayo
http://argosbooks.org/?p=3103
What kinds of errant crystals has Sade LaNay placed upon their throat to make these polyvocalities so audible? So that from the violated archives of Black history, LaNay makes a clearing for a fugitive chorus — poets, organizers, librarians, educators, reverends, —who refuse to negotiate on the ...
Congratulations Athena Farrokhzad and Jen Hayashida! We were thrilled to see White Blight receive an honorable mention on this incredible list!
This is the list that almost broke us.
New work from Marina Blitshteyn up at Hyperallergic !!
Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected two poems by Marina Blitshteyn for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
Literary Hub
"It is incredibly inspiring that the first author that we know of in all of human history was a woman living within a kick-your-teeth-down-your-throat, highly repressive patriarchal society."
Very, very happy to see Two Hunters by Marina Blitshteyn on this list! Congrats, Marina!!
https://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/Poetry-Bestsellers-January-2019.aspx
Poetry Bestsellers January 2019 SPD Poetry Bestsellers January 2019 G by Emmalea Russo (Futurepoem Books) Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun, ...
Today is your last chance to get Two Hunters ON SALE at Small Press Distribution !!
Use the code "Handpicked" to receive 20% off!!
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781938247316/two-hunters.aspx
Two Hunters Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. The sonically-hypnotic poems in this collection pry open the space between sounds and what they mean, and the violence of this prying is analogous to the ordinary violences that women live with the world over. "Ora...
Two Hunters is BACK IN STOCK at Small Press Distribution! You can get 20% with the code HANDPICKED.
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/CategoryCenter/HDPK/Handpicked.aspx
4, TOTALLY FRESH, CERTIFIED SMALL PRESS, BOOKS WE RELISHHANDPICKED BY US, FOR YOU, EVERY MONTH20% off w/ code HANDPICKED
Excited beyond measure to see The Fat Sonnets by Samantha Zighelboim on The Adroit Journal's Best of: Poetry 2018 list!!!!
http://www.theadroitjournal.org/blog/2018/12/27/adroits-best-books-of-2018?fbclid=IwAR2E-Y4uhf9-1IoY8mZd2Svp0tpuA8hOV5pxWYnrCBgqlw2c-eZL4cokpOI
2018 has been a standout year for Adroit and our engagement with new poetry and the poets who write it. This year, we featured over one hundred interviews and reviews in our issues and on our blog. Read on for a list of some of our favorite poetry collections illuminated in those features. Endless
Thrilled to see Marina Blitshteyn's Two Hunters in such great company! Get it while it's on sale!
IT'S A BRAND NEW YEAR AND A BRAND NEW #SPDHANDPICKED!!! Crushing it from the start w/ beaut titles from Futurepoem, Black Ocean, Belladonna* Collaborative and Argos Books
20% off all month w/ code HANDPICKED
http://spdbooks.org/handpicked
"Marina Blitshteyn, queen of the chapbook form, releases her first full-length collection, Two Hunters (Argos Books), later this month. Two Hunters offers you a Hurtz Donut on the playground. (The fun game where you get bopped in the nose and asked: "Hurts, don't it?") But Blitshteyn's work isn't cruel; it hurts because the depth of its empathy plumbs, plumbs, plunges."
In keeping with our yearly tradition, some members of the Poetry Foundation's staff share a book (or two) they enjoyed most in 2018. *** Rebecca Stoner, Permissions Coordinator I loved Indecency (Coffee House)...
So happy to see Dept of Posthumous Letters on this list! Congratulations to Caitie Moore, Dot Devota, (illustrator) Brandon Shimoda and book designers BankerWessel !
Best of 2018: Non-Fiction Books was last modified: December 6th, 2018 by
https://www.commonpodcast.com/home/2018/12/18/episode-62-khadijah-queen
Rachel Zucker speaks with scholar, poet, playwright, professor, artist, mother Khadijah Queen about what she’s teaching, her doctoral studies, her memoir-in-progress, her newest book ( I’m So Fine ), her new, unpublished poems, simultaneity and happening-aliveness, emotion, emotion as knowledge,...
Unknown John Donne manuscript discovered in Suffolk
Found in a box, the 400-year-old volume is one of the largest handwritten collections of the poet’s verse and is expected to sell for more than £200,000
HAPPY SOLSTICE!
Celebrate by getting 30% off WHITE BLIGHT with the code MAGIC
or a mystery box at the Small Press Distribution holiday sale !!
http://bit.ly/2EYf3I4
On Sale ~* MYSTERY BOX SOLSTICE SALE *~ Here we are in the Dark Place - deep in the shadow of Thanksgiving, with the dread...
For our sixth Argos Poetry Calendar, we are thrilled to present Diana Arterian’s Songs of Innorience, our first calendar featuring a work by a single poet/artist. In this series, Arterian combines the text and original lithograph images of William Blake’s beloved Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, using principles of intuition and intimacy to weave together the opposing valences of Blake’s profound vision. These pieces offer an uncanny encounter with Blake’s familiar images and language, made new through Arterian’s particular mythological sensibility. “I stained the hollow floor/I wrote each clear day,” ends the first piece in the series, featured for the month of January 2019. The calendar brings a wild new Blakean multimedia gem for each month through February 2020: deliciously dangerous companions as we head toward a new decade of the 21st century.
PRE-ORDER NOW!!
http://argosbooks.org/?p=2994
For our sixth Argos Poetry Calendar, we are thrilled to present Diana Arterian’s Songs of Innorience, our first calendar featuring a work by a single poet/artist. In this series, Arterian combines the text and original lithograph images of William Blake’s beloved Songs of Innocence and Songs of ...
Samantha Zighelboim on "Fat Dream with Blue Whale" - Poetry Society of America
This poem, the penultimate in my book The Fat Sonnets, began as a sort of healing after a difficult day of being reminded by the world that I occupy too much space in it. Most instances of being bullied or fat shamed are difficult to forget, innumerable as they are, and I very clearly remember the....
Athena Farrokhzad is on tour in South Africa, and White Blight is being released there for the first time in a special transnational publishing collaboration with uHlanga press!
Congratulations, Athena Farrokhzad, Jen Hayashida & uHlanga!
https://www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=44180
Swedish writer Athena Farrokhzad tours South Africa appearing at events in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Cape Town from 27 August to 10 September 2018.
New interview of Samantha Zighelboim is up now at BOMB Magazine:
The fat body is constantly viewed in a transient state, toward thinness or death... It’s a revolutionary act, to experience and portray the fat body as something you can live in and sit inside without working toward another form. I’m not there yet, in my journey. I’m coming from a long history of dieting; I can’t take a single bite of food today without guilt. It’s possible I’ll always feel like I was meant to be a thin woman—and I hate that—but I’m actively striving to silence the “eating disorder voice” and to dismantle its damaging thought processes.
What I have accepted is that the struggle will not go away—it’s a facet of who I am; part relentless disorder, part enduring cultural and societal conditioning—and I’m resolved to confront it, no matter what, every day for the rest of my life.
In the book, thinness is not an ideological goal; it’s weighted, and fraught with pain.
The poet on confronting societal limitations about the body, navigating the language of fatness, and celebrating friendships that embrace the joy of food.
Maybe you missed Samantha Zighelboim's AMA, but luckily you can still read all the brilliant things she said!
❤
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/91ime6/im_samantha_zighelboim_author_of_the_fat_sonnets/
Hi everyone! I’m a poet, translator, educator, feminist and foodie. I also have an eating disorder and have struggled with being deeply...
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ODER!
Long awaited, but thankfully arriving at the moment we need it most, Marina Blitshteyn’s Two Hunters skillfully mirrors, confirms and explains our disorienting moment in history by mining the poets’ own experience of patriarchy and America with such confidence and linguistic dexterity we almost believe we can survive it. Sonically inventive, formally surprising, energetic, and sometimes a bit surreal, these poems are at once exhilarating to read and deeply unsettling (though necessary) in their truth.
– Lynn Melnick
http://argosbooks.org/?p=2961
The sonically-hypnotic poems in this collection pry open the space between sounds and what they mean, and the violence of this prying is analogous to the ordinary violences that women live with the world over. “Orange you happy yet, a serious threat/a surfeit, a certain fate, a surer fret,” Blit...
We're thrilled with every word of this sensitive, gorgeous review. Thank you, Claudia Cortese !!
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Fat people will see their stories and lives reflected in this book in ways that they have never seen themselves reflected in literature before. And when I say fat people, I mean everyone. The majority of us are fat, and those who are not know someone who is. Moreover, thin people have also been shaped by the fear and terror of fatness. Of course, this terror dominates in some communities more than others, but everyone in our culture has at least witnessed the widespread fat shaming campaigns propagated by the fashion, dieting, and medical industries. Everyone’s body has fat on it—a human being cannot survive with zero percent body fat. Most have a curdle of cellulite at our thighs, pudge in our hips and belly, even if the BMI would not declare us “overweight” or “obese” (two terms I loathe using as they are laden with the medicalized ways that fat people’s oppression has been justified: the logic is that our bodies are not healthy, so we deserve to be mistreated—despite evidence showing that when a host of factors such as genetics, access to health care, stress, sleep, and yo-yo dieting, are taken into consideration, fatness may not actually cause the health problems medical industries claim it does). In other words, you will likely laugh, cry, sigh, and nod in recognition while reading this book, and once you get to the end—you will rejoice! Also, you may eat an ice cream cone topped with rainbow sprinkles.
https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/review---samantha-zighelboim.html
Samantha Zighelboim’s first collection, The Fat Sonnets (Argos Books, 2018), opens unlike any poetry book I have read: Here are our...
I don’t feel any less a part of the fat acceptance movement just because I can’t accept myself. I sing, I celebrate the people who can access the privilege of body positivity, who are changing the world with their bravery and their refusal to compromise their happiness for the sake of their thinness. Every single day, they challenge the normative body ideals that have kept me prisoner. They remain visible, vocal and unapologetic about their bodies. I follow them intently, hoping to absorb even a fraction of their strength. Maybe someday I’ll arrive at a place of peace and acceptance and move past these traumas. But that is the dream—not the reality. Not yet.
This conflicted voice seems to be largely missing from the conversation around the politics of fat acceptance, and most especially, the poetics of fatness. So I started writing poems about the uglier realities of living in a fat body, choosing the sonnet form to subvert and reclaim a space traditionally reserved for more palatable themes (like romance). I squeezed into and out of the form, trying to make space for my body and the complexities of my experience in it. Using the sonnet was a radical choice intended to defy (and also adhere to) limitation and constraint. The freedom to push and redefine the parameters of form is one I have never been able to afford my own form—my body.
https://lithub.com/on-the-poetics-of-fatness/
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself” By the time I turned 30, I’d lived the majority of my life beli…
For Astroecology is, essentially, a work of science fiction shattered into images, text, intertext, the pieces coming together to expand the genre, both of science fiction and of poetry.
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2018/04/19/astroecology-by-johannes-helden-why-this-book-should-win/
This morning’s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge—and Riffraff co-owner—Emma Ramadan.
Astroecology has been longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award!
http://translationista.com/2018/04/2018-best-translated-book-award-longlists-announced.html
It’s that BTBA time of year, and the longlists for the Best Translated Book Awards in Poetry and Fiction have just been announced. This year’s judges include Raluca Albu, Jarrod Annis, Tess Lewis, Aditi Machado, and Emma Ramadan for poetry, and Caitlin L. Baker, Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, ...
Check out Bianca Lynne Spriggs in this month's issue of Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine!!!
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We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer.
We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest
and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea,
and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble.
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146238/what-women-are-made-of
There are many kinds of open.
As far as the relationship between truth and fiction, the truth of fiction is what we connect to, as readers, on a heart level. Fiction helps us access the truth via feeling—or, perhaps more accurately, a felt knowing—rather than bare facts. That kind of deep understanding is only made deeper when we know any accompanying facts. Our intuition is powerful. The truth in fiction taps into that intuition, and helps us to further trust it, which makes for a more complete knowing.
https://pen.org/draft-the-pen-ten-with-khadijah-queen/
I wanted to say that my identity determines my opportunities to make a living, how much or little time I get to spend writing, and what I write about. But, that's all rubbish... writers would do better focusing on doing the work rather than "the writer's identity". That feels like a privilege.
Brooklyn, NY
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