In her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. The couple's journey is charted through conversations, dreams, memories, and meditations, expanding and exploding the emotive capabilities of language and form. A text like no other, it crosses genres, combining verse, prose, and dialogue to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and...

Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid--channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldua, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuna, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer--Carroll's second collection of prose poems and word-images contemplates the cost of living in an era of "cruel optimism." Procedurally formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian's shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. "Cognative dissonance" meets "the rite to...

With a new introduction by Calvin Bedient
Claudia Rankine s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poemsobsessive, intrepid, eroticspeak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and find redemption through mourning. Rankine writes with unflinching attention to exterior detail and emotional nuance, as well as with linguistic and formal innovation, crafting an extraordinarily powerful, utterly unique portrait of sorrow and...

Recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. This book shows how the accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive.