Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
DEED by torrin a. greathouse
DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse’s 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn’t always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.
apparitions (nines) by Nat Raha
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
VAGABOND CITY 