Publications

• Writing with Caca

  “There goes the poet Salvador Novo aboard a sleepless taxi. Did you notice his lips? The intense red of his closed lips? Pray he doesn’t open them. People say he has a sharp, poisonous tongue. They say he’s a snake. They say he’s a bitch. They say he’s a whore. I don’t know him personally. I’ve only read his poems, the ones he has written, the ones he’ll write soon.”

  Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. Translated with verve by JD Pluecker, the book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan’s HD Book, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon’s Rimbaud the Son, Fabre’s Writing with Caca is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer.

  Praise for the book:

  A page-turner biography of the poet and writer Salvador Novo whose queer shoulder pushed every wall open. In here is Novo’s deviant knowledge of what the shit and anus reveal of life, yet “resists is sublimation.” This book is not for the timid, or maybe it is precisely for them! —CAConrad

  Luis Felipe Fabre, one of the most exciting and virtuosic Mexican poets of his generation, knows a lot of good shit. He knows a lot about Salvador Novo, the scatalogical Mexican poet of the early 20th century who, according to Octavio Paz, wrote “not with blood but with caca.” This terrific book (translated with acrobatic brilliance by John Pluecker), is a work of literary history, literary criticism, poetry, and excretory theory that travels from the Aztecs to Sor Juana to the Mexican Revolution and to contemporary times. Fabre makes a compelling argument for the importance of Novo’s writing with caca, and for the importance of celebrating writers who are driven by the “urge to take a crap on all universal literature.”  —Daniel Borzutzky

   

• Humanoid

  Humanoid is Joel Craig’s second book, after 2012’s The White House. For this new book, Craig challenged himself to jettison all his old tricks and come up with a new way of writing. Humanoid presents the result of his experiments: an expanded lyric form that drifts across the page, moving between direct discourse and the outer limits of hipster cosmology.

  Praise for the book:

  These marvelous, intently dialogic poems believe in that presence (and that absence) that we call “the reader.” In Humanoid, each sharply measured poem staggers down the page in its self-interrupting performance, tilting and darting toward an elusive social possibility—that we, whatever “we“ are, might actually come to somehow dwell together. These poems do so in their own fleet idiom of admonishment—self-admonishment and admonishment directed toward others, reader included. It all combines in the rushing substance full of sting, care and delight that is this poetry’s movement. Alertly observant of its own cognition, and the foibles of cognition at the interior of its historical moment, this is harsh and tender, often funny and always deeply urgent work that Joel Craig has given us. Despite all the forces pushing against the possibility of such a thing, there is much love in it. —Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff and Father of Noise

  The speaker of the poems of Joel Craig’s Humanoid floats and careens in the interstices between tract housing, breaking news, love, and existential questions regarding time in the Anthropocene, so called. The difference between what we want to hear and the alternative is terrifying, but it is also where life is now. This book says such things.—Lucy Ives

• Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect

  $30 / or $10 courtesy of the Field Foundation via inquiry

  The Wall of Respect, a work of public art created in 1967 at the corner of Forty-third Street and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, depicted Black leaders in music,  literature, politics, theater, and sports. The Wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, provided a platform for community engagement, and was a foundational work of the Black Arts Movement. There is no longer any physical indication of its existence, but it still needs to be remembered. Romi Crawford proposes the concept of “fleeting monuments,” asking a range of artists and writers to realize antiheroic, non static, and impermanent strategies for commemoration. Featuring contributions from Miguel Aguilar, Abdul Akalimat and the Amus Mor Project, Wisdom Baty, Lauren Berlant, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, Darryl Cowherd, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Theaster Gates, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Stephanie Koch, Kelly Lloyd, Damon Locks, Haki Madhubuti, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell Gantt, Naeem Mohaiemen, K. Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Visiting Val Gray Ward, Mechtild Widrich, and Bernard Williams. Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press.

  Advance Praise: “Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect is stunning, revelatory, and moving—a magical accomplishment. It is history, art, witnessing come alive through all the senses. It is deeply important. Read it, read it again, gift it, consult it, quote it, and remember.” —Yo-Yo Ma

  “These ‘Fleeting Monuments’ are rich, generous gifts grounded in this Black nationalist geography that continues to offer reflection, hope, and joy.” —Dr. Kymberly Pinder

  “The Wall of Respect is in all of us, and this book is an ideally heartwarming story of how Chicago has created a culture of resistance, resilience, and revolution. A must-read.” —Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

  “This book is a clarion call for us all to reimagine how we remember both the dreams deferred and the joys of history. Once you step into its pages, you realize it is also a portal to a dazzling world away from the dreariness of debates about monuments and memorials to a free world where our radical imaginations are unleashed to create something truly beautiful and new.” —Dr. Lisa Yun Lee

  This project is partially supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through the foundation’s initiative Art Design Chicago. Additional support comes from the Field Foundation of Illinois and the Graham Foundation or Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.