Nightboat Books

A long-awaited, comprehensive collection of renowned poet and performance artist Jayne Cortez’s poetry.Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

A revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing—from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother’s disappearance—Mellis’s prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.

"Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable." —New York MagazineDavid Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir’s poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields.I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I''m thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.