Caroline Bergvall

Teresa Carmody

Vanessa Place

Laynie Browne

Poetry. Fiction. Women's Studies. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place, the book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries. Contributors respond to the question: What is conceptual writing? I'LL DROWN MY BOOK offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon. Contributors are Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Mónica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, giovanni singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris and Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

Conceptual Writing by Women

I'll Drown My Book

Pollen Memory

Practice

Poetry. In DAILY SONNETS Laynie Browne charts new territory as she subtly investigates the daily influxes of the poetic moment. From longing for the family in the very midst of the family, to the play of the mind which mimics and shepherds the visible games of children, Browne offers here the mimesis of the possible, a moving reflection of action and intimacy, a letting go and a grasping of the poetic and the political, all in the firm hold of song.

Daily Sonnets

Fiction. Amelia has the ability to levitate. During her wanderings through dream galleries, costumed performances, and future libraries she meets Clara (an elusive photographer), Sebastion (part human, part lion) and a chorus of cynics who exist only in partial bodies. "Part mystery and part Oz story, ACTS OF LEVITATION is a narrative of exquisite disappearances and re-appearances... As always, Laynie Browne's work is ephemeral, complex, and alluring"--Lisa Jarnot.

Acts of Levitation

This National Poetry Series-winning collection emerges from half-remembered fairy tales and reconstructed dreams.

The Scented Fox

How do we experience the world before memory, before language, before the senses have separated, or before the concepts of “you” and “I” have been distinguished? Laynie Browne investigates both the limits and potential of such an inchoate world in her new book of poetry, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. In a series of elegant prose poems, Browne guides the reader through the intricate development of human perception, where the haunting vastness of childhood slowly gives way to the defining features of adult cognition. Subtly nuanced verse constructs a world of color before sight and utterance before language--all the while aware that, ironically, language itself makes this ethereal world possible.

Poems

Drawing of a Swan Before Memory

Selected by Alice Notley for the National Poetry Series, Laynie Browne's sixth collection casts a spell. In these fragmented poetic tales, characters disappear and reemerge, their charms reconfigured, their stories unraveling, their happy endings elusive. The book's coda consists of a fantastical poetic dictionary, asking readers to redefine their sense of meaning. Laynie Browne was born in 1966 and grew up in Los Angeles. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Daily Sonnets and Mermaid's Purse. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington Bothell and Mills College.

Fiction. "Laynie Browne channels the energy of Mira in a book that is both charred and luminous. Her writing is a gift of abrasion, making the body of the reader a portal too. Who is arriving? Who is very near? The intensity of this narrative carried me through the summer in which I read it. Browne is a genius of aperture and stance. All desire, she has written a remarkable book. It changes something to read it (the book) and to have it near. If you are reading these words, then you have found your way to Browne's work and her immense, compassionate and tender genius as a writer and a human being."—Bhanu Kapil

(a Future Memoir)

The Ivory Hour

Poetry. SCORPYN ODES explores the iconic history of the scorpion in literature and mythology, as animal and constellation, demon, poison and guardian. What may be learned from a species with a four-hundred-million year history? How might evolutionary intelligence be a lens through which to consider various cultural maladies? Verse odes are interspersed with prose departures, and muse upon the many literal and metaphorical connotations of leaving. What must we celebrate, and from what must we depart in order to reaffirm a more sustainable humanity? What is the human equivalent to molting? What happens when disintegration of landscape becomes internalized? What depths of loss do we traverse in a time when toxicity challenges our ability to see our surroundings? How to build a house of hope with the potency to counter symptomatic forgetfulness? This work explores the possibility of "departure" as locomotion or energy source, travel and incantatory momentum.

Scorpyn Odes

"A new collection of poetry by Laynie Browne"--

Translating the Lilies Back Into Lists

Browne's Book of Moments strongly recalls her previous Lost Parkour (Ps)alms (2014), while taking a step toward bringing us closer to what we are. We are creatures of prayers. Prayers define us—Prayers stand at the root of poetry.

The Book of Moments

Browne’s psalms are in a close relationship with what an individual experiences or feels. They express precise circumstances. They come as a response to a need, a thirst, a hunger. To find and underline alms in psalms: To write one’s own psalms. Browne’s psalter is grounded in the noble and prestigious tradition of song as a privileged place for personality’s input and growth within and through religion. What a freedom! What a multiplicity of moves is stressed, within such a tradition, one to which Lost Parkour Ps(alms) takes us! With what audacity! With what self-confidence!

Lost parkour ps(alms)

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Drama. "Motherhood and housewyfery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again"--Anne Waldman. Prose, verse, letters, and plays, THE DESIRES OF LETTERS is a searing commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative...[in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time"--Juliana Spahr.

Or, My Letters, the Reproduction of the Letters, the Letters that Changed Everything, Some Other Kind of Mothers, Bebel's Letters, My Pillow Letters, Tender Letters, Portrait of a Letter, Letters Solitary Apparition, the Letter Without Qualities, Letters: a Epic, the Garden of Letters, Letter Found on the Rings of Saturn, the Hour of the Letter, Within a Budding Letter, Letter, Lavransdatter, Close to You & Closer to Letters, Night Letters, a Feather on the Breath of Letters, Animal Letters, the Human Letters, the Four Year Old Letters, O My Companion, All I See are Letters

The Desires of Letters

The Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the prose and poetry of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including: Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting and action. The contributors, all poets in their own right like, Brian Blanchfield, Brandon Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C.D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results.

Laynie Browne

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