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New lyric poetry by Rachel Galvin explores an ethical response to American comfort and its ties to war and exploitation. The poems in this collection reflect on news reporting, natural disasters, journalist safety, and the act of observing war from a distance as a civilian. Written in a variety of forms and registers—from elegies to faits divers to sonnets—Elevated Threat Level thinks about violence and the rhetoric used to convey it. The book is also a tribute to the print form of the newspaper.
From Elevated Threat Level:
In Wartime There Are No Civilians
But you weren’t there when the house was bombed, what could you tell them?
You hadn’t seen the girl chain herself down either.
And if you had, you wouldn’t remember it now.
Their badges weren’t written in your language.
High-octane fuel, they said.
A dog crouched nearby, they said.
The referent eludes you, keeps eluding you.
Damn the cages, damn the metal works, this place
is a hinterland of bulldozers and people
whose chests crack open in their path.
Praise for the book:
Perhaps every poem is a riddle for which the answer is the poem itself. Perhaps each of these adroit lyrics by the poet, critic, translator, and activist Rachel Galvin is a riddle for which the answer is the entire world in all its sad, brutal, and delightful contradiction. For surely every brief lyric in this book feels simultaneously triaged amidst a world of active damage and precisely poised, resourceful, nimble as a needle, quick as a stitch. For surely every brief lyric in this book has the dazzle and dismay of a candle, just as it goes out. –Joyelle McSweeney
These ingenious, funny-sad, empathic poems are woundingly precise in their exposure of a pattern of world-damage, of power misused “in our name.” The recent history spotlighted in Galvin’s poems is nauseating, but it’s rendered with such pleasurably incisive phrasing and sonic swerve that I look up from the book awake, clarified, galvanized to face again the music and the news. –Catherine Wagner
About the author:
Rachel Galvin is the author of News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor, with Bonnie Costello, of Auden at Work (2015) and a poetry collection titled Pulleys & Locomotion (2009). She is translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (2013) and co-translator, with Harris Feinsod, of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo (Open Letter Books, 2018). Poems and translations appear in The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. Her criticism appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket 2, MLN, and Modernism/modernity. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective. Galvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.
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Mark Booth, Alexandria Eregbu, Simone Forti, Becky Grajeda, Hannah B Higgins, Terri Kapsalis, Tim Kinsella, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Dao Nguyen, Caroline Picard, Jeffrey Skoller, and Shawn Michelle Smith
$30.00
Shadowed! confronts the slippage of time and action within Ellen Rothenberg’s exhibition elsetime. Sweeping through the studio of Bertolt Brecht, Woodstock in the sixties, Berlin in the nineties, and the Syrian protests of today, Shadowed! projects a dispersive, unfolding temporality. Beginning with a suite of elsetime photographs, the book continues with reflections on the show by Hannah B Higgins, Jeffrey Skoller, Caroline Picard, and Shawn Michelle Smith—spreading out from there into an artist’s archive that includes scanned fragments of writings by Stefan Brecht, Allen Ginsberg, Angela Davis, and transcribed contributions from Simone Forti. A subsequent section includes documentation of performances produced in response to elsetime by artists, activists, and musicians. Shadowed! ends with the transcript of a public conversation that took place within the original exhibit, capturing a discussion that incorporates an active audience. By layering these performative, photographic, and written encounters, Shadowed! allows the afterimage of an exhibition to unfurl beyond the gallery, beyond this book, and into its own elsetime.
“Ellen Rothenberg’s multimodal installation elsetime interlaced performance actions, installation, objects, public invitations to fellow artists, and visual essays. In this beautiful and thoughtfully designed book, you’ll find each of these aspects explored anew as though readied for further action. New pieces by collaborators enter the scene and become enmeshed in photographic echoes from ‘60s collective rallying, music documentary, contemporary migrancy, material icons, and the live events generated during the exhibition. The great exclamation mark of the title brings all these absents squarely into view, while posing the pressing question: how does one avoid reenacting shadows from the past!” —Caroline Bergvall, artist, writer, performer, and author of Drift.
“The four essays ground readers in specific moments in the vast expanse of history that Rothenberg’s work engages from the 1930s to the present. Together, these essays help unpack the labyrinth of meanings and allusions that each of Rothenberg’s objects offers. The writers reveal what Rothenberg initiates in ‘elsetime’: that histories change as different objects consume divergent subjectivities and as bodies come together to interact with them and their surrounding architectures.” —Newcity
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Ravi Agarwal, Robin Blaser, Romi Crawford, Stephen Lapthisophon, Nathaniel Mackey, Abhishek Narula, Nina Power, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and others
$75.00
On Civil Disobedience is a monthly pamphlet series featuring writers from a range of professional backgrounds to contribute essays addressing the title topic. The series will recall historical precedents set by Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Arendt and others while considering the pamphlet’s important role in American revolutionary history. Filtering civic responsibility through the combined awareness of histories and disciplines, we hope these essays will ask how citizenship and resistance intersect within the pledge of democratic ideals. Designed by Dakota Brown, confirmed contributors thus far include Ravi Agarwal (Environmental Activism), Robin Blaser (Poetry), Romi Crawford (Race and Affect Theory), Stephen Lapthisophon (Art and Theory), Nathaniel Mackey (Poetry), Abhishek Narula (Data Engineering), Nina Power (Feminist Theory), T Clutch Fleischmann (Essay), and Jennif(f)er Tamayo (Poetry). Subscribe and be the first to receive your copy in the mail. Series launches Fall of 2017.
Annual subscribers receive 12 issues of On Civil Disobedience once a month by mail (shipping included), receive a free tote bag, and have the first opportunity to RSVP to monthly reading groups that meet at Sector 2337 to discuss each pamphlet. Your support goes towards writer honorariums as well as printing and design costs affiliated with the series.
