Omnidawn Publishing

McCrae’s latest collection considers the nature of perception and experiments with form and punctuation.   This is a book about perceiving and being perceived. The various subjects of these poems are viewed by an artist, a devil, a soul floating out of a body it had inhabited, a god fed up with her husband’s infidelities, and a father whose young child has COVID-19. The poems of Two Appearances After the Resurrection are haunted by the question of what one ought to do with their perceivability. After a decade of publishing poems almost exclusively utilizing no punctuation aside from the slash, Shane McCrae began including semi-regular punctuation in his 2023 book, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. He continues that project in Two Appearances After the Resurrection. Here, he further explores the consequences—especially the rhythmical consequences—of the change. Throughout these poems, McCrae perceives and implicitly considers his own shifting approaches to writing.

Experimental lyric and narrative poetry that brings together philosophy, theology, and humor.   The nameless narrator of Coda attempts to trace the origins of linguistic and perceptual differentiation by experimenting with contemporary lyric and narrative forms. Moving between extravagant prosody and obsessive disquisition, Seidenberg’s poetry works to reconfigure conceptual imperatives found throughout philosophy and theology. With a focus on the structure of memory and the decadence of the body, Seidenberg describes the epistemological regress of desire, intention, knowledge, and discernment.   Seidenberg brings together the language and concerns of figures including Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, alongside elements of raucous humor drawn from the tradition of Rabelais, Beckett, Lispector, and Sterne.

Poetry that finds meaning and connection in the process of creating pottery from clay.   The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter’s wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk’s process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of ceramic forms. For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter’s hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.   The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.