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09/01/2025

Celebrate Controlled Demolition with us on September 19th, 6-8pm, at the Martin E. Segal Theater at the CUNY Grad Center

Reading by Ammiel Alcalay, music (vocals and ‘oud) by Safira Berrada-Riggs, and an introduction & conversation with Zohra Saed.

Copies of *Controlled Demolition* will be available for purchase at the event. RSVP at the link in bio!

From Controlled Demolition:
I’m convinced that we no longer see the same way we used to, that we can’t, as our field of vision has been under such relentless duress by the rapidity of data and image that our physical being has adapted to the point of resisting the imprint of live phenomena and event. I am trying to slow this process down, it’s not even that I’m trying to see—we may be well beyond that by now—but to sift through events, moments, images, and find trails to come to our senses again, within: to find texture, weight, dimension, depth, the compass of our very organs ensconced in the alien depths of our inner channels and byways.

08/28/2025

Poet Biswamit Dwibedy unpacks print fresh copies of his new book ERODE.

"How are you not already reading this book and inside it already? Biswamit Dwibedy will teach you how to read Biswamit Dwibedy like a golden lock flicked from a bang, like Nina Simone lip-syncing the latest Björk, like wearing faux fur to a real red paint party inside a faux bois factory." – Sandra Doller on ERODE

We are launching ERODE on September 15 but you can already preorder the book through our website and at Asterism Books.

And this fall, catch Biswamit on his European book tour — more details soon!

08/21/2025

The Poetry Foundation recently published a folio of Norma Cole’s work, featuring her poetry and critical essays on her work.

In the fall, Litmus is excited to be republishing Norma Cole’s translation of Danielle Collobert’s “Notebooks, 1956-1978.” Stay tuned!

In Danielle Collobert’s “Notebooks” the questions—of presence in the world, of politics and intimacy—are constantly recovered from the blur of experience. Collobert moves towards and away in a feverish attempt to connect, stay connected—whether in her personal encounters, moments of activism or writing—and though she ultimately chooses death, there is enough life in her writing to carry on: “the hum of life all around… I open / and I close.”

08/19/2025

Our very own E. Tracy Grinnell, as well as Isabelle Garron and Eléna Rivera responding to Joan Mitchell… �

via @ joanmitchellfdn :

>>>�

“Isabelle Garron on the Joan Mitchell Poetry Project:

I feel connected to Mitchell through her gesture, her relationship to color, the audacity of her opening of forms to a change of perspective outside of any affiliation. The experience of her works is the unstoppable stream that irrigates the poem I’m looking for, just like the example she sets for inhabiting a world as an artist, by risking all the energy our body gives us to manifest its form and song.

“Joan Mitchell’s painting has left its mark on the poetics of many women poets I know. She is one of the essential references in our conversations. I’m thinking of Catherine Weinzaepflen, whose writing is imbued with the landscape, painting, and color, and the American poets E. Tracy Grinnell and Eléna Rivera.

“Two years ago, Eléna, Tracy, and I started a project we refer to between ourselves as the “Mitchell project.” It’s a kind of three-person workshop writing, always inspired by one of Joan’s works. The painting that sparked this process is The Bridge (1956). Using The Bridge to inaugurate this project emphasizes our wish to invent unprecedented bridges between the fine arts and poetry. We’re also thinking of using the title The Bridge for an online review we want to launch with the ambition of sharing the link between contemporary poetry and the work of female artists.”

is a poet based in Paris, France. The poem excerpts shared here respond to Mitchell’s work “The Bridge” (1956, first slide). Follow the link in bio to read the full poems by Garron, E. Tracy Grinnell ( ), and Eléna Rivera ().

This text and Garron’s poem were translated from the French originals by Nicholas Elliott. Les versions françaises sont disponibles sur le lien dans la bio.

Pictured in first slide: Joan Mitchell, The Bridge, 1956. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 70 3/8 in. Private Collection. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. "

07/30/2025

After a brief absence, Youmna Chlala’s 2019 poetry book, “The Paper Camera” is back in stock. Order your copy at the link in our bio!

Of “The Paper Camera,” Etel Adnan praises: “This is a remarquable ‘camera’ work where the film keeps moving along people who’re running from city to city, continent to continent, directed by ‘a young girl (who) sticks her tongue out of a gun.’ Covering, and uncovering Lebanon, [Youmna Chlala] extracts a remarkable poetry from a continuously exploding war.”

07/16/2025

We’re thrilled to share a NEW RELEASE on CUNY Manifold Open Poetics:

DEAD YOUTH, or, THE LEAKS�by Joyelle McSweeney�

…is now live as a FREE ebook in the Open Poetics Series — a critical, multimedia edition of this once out‑of‑print Litmus Press title. It reanimates McSweeney’s “badly‑wired allegory” of dead teenagers hijacked by Julian Assange on a farcical journey that’s part cyber‑dystopia, part global fable.��

This eBook is a living text built into CUNY’s Manifold platform, with resource collections curated by Litmus Press and Joyelle McSweeney. These include annotations, embedded images and videos, critical essays, reviews and archival material — and collaborative reading features so users can discuss line by line in public or private reading groups.

Tap the link in bio to access the full edition.

07/01/2025

The Fortnightly Review recently published a review of Will Alexander’s “The Coming Mental Range,” published by Litmus Press in 2023.

KPrevallet writes: “The essays in this book seem like communiques from the distant future, sent here via time’s spiraling nonlocality, through Will Alexander’s human body directing the transmission. This afro-futuristic prophesy takes place on the cusp –our present moment— just before Elon Musk and his band of billionaire cronies mine all earth and moon resources to subsidize their space travel and colonization of Mars, leaving the rest of us behind to survive in the spoils of climate catastrophe and perpetual displacement. Who else is best to convey this urgent warning other than an intra-cosmic poet whose syntax, attuned to language as a “connection to the unseen,” has always defied the capitalists and colonizers of the mind?”

06/26/2025

We are excited to reveal the cover of another forthcoming title, “ERODE” by Biswamit Dwibedy to be released in September, with cover art by Julia Klein.

Biswamit Dwibedy’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, “ERODE,” brings together his first out-of-print book, “Ozalid,” and the expansion of that work into “Erode.” As a single collection, these sequences unfold in movements of erasure and collage. What emerges is a poetics of accumulation and subtraction, a method of excavation that reveals the personal buried within the communal, the lyric submerged in the residual.

F***y Howe writes: “Biswamit’s poems arrive and depart simultaneously, or at least give an impression of being both a trail ahead and a trail behind a moving figure. This seems to me to be a cosmic figure, in the spirit of Jesus, because of its gleam and its disappearance.”

06/24/2025

We are excited to reveal the cover of Mira Mattar’s “Yes, I Am A Destroyer,” featuring art by Hazem Harb ().

Originally published by Ma Bibliothèque (.liotheque) the first US edition of “Yes, I Am A Destroyer” will be released by Litmus in September.

Mattar melds the abjection of wage labor and domestic work, the resentment and fury of the working class, and the alienation of the exile, into a barbed prose that takes its vengeance on those who still live in comfort.

“Ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid,” “Yes, I Am A Destroyer” “embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance” (Lisa Robertson).

06/22/2025

The latest issue of Iowa Review features none other than author Elizabeth Willis—painted by Red Danielson—on its cover. Inside, you’ll find a conversation between Willis and Danielson about their creative processes, along with two poems by Willis. Check it out!

Litmus Press is honored to have published Elizabeth’s poetry alongside Nancy Bowen in their 2023 book, Spectral Evidence.

Spectral Evidence pairs each of the 46 stanzas of Willis’s “The Witch Poem” with a drawing or collage by Bowen, whose iconographic style moves deftly between humor and seriousness—echoing the affective range of Willis’s poem:
“With a glance, she will make rancid the fresh butter of her righteous neighbor.”
“A witch may cry out sharply at the sight of a known criminal dying of thirst.”

06/16/2025

We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Virginie Poitrasson’s debut poetry collection in English, The Unlikeness of Things, translated by Michelle Noteboom!

Poitrasson’s collection roves the territories where the ambiguities of perception brush up against the unspeakable, or even the fantastical. The writing opens onto a stark, startling, phenomenological field, in which the ordinary objects of everyday life participate fully in the ongoing formation and deformation of the self, and the body merges with its domestic surroundings, such that “fingers stiffen like wood” and a cup of tea is “steeped in… thoughts, traces of memories and halftone images.

Ben Lerner reflects that “the terror of depersonalization alternates with the promise of new senses. “My body is no longer a border, I pour into a room.” Every border in this beautiful book is strained until it vibrates.”

Inspired by the hauntingly enigmatic work of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Dorothea Tanning, The Unlikeness of Things offers a precisely related series of small sensory epiphanies: hallucinations, strange visual impressions and experiences. Click the link in our bio to buy a copy!

06/10/2025

Ammiel Alcalay is on 🔥

Check out his recent essays in Middle East Eye, and his recent seminar on CONTROLLED DEMOLITION (Litmus Press, 2025) at the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa in Porto.

Then, go hear him read and discuss two recent books, CONTROLLED DEMOLITION and Nassar Rabah’s “Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece” (City Lights, 2025, co-translated with Emna Zghal and Khaled Al-Hilli) at on June 13th 7pm EST.

This event will be livestreamed to Brookline Booksmith’s YouTube channel. Links to Ammiel’s recent writings & events in our bio!

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