The debut book of poetry from Madison McCartha.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "A long-distance runner extraordinaire, Will Alexander parses and devours information, code and arcana lest they parse and devour him, parse and devour us. What but deep seas and distant galaxies would make such a demand his extended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer. These high-toned reflections and imprecations unfold in a march mode almost, an ever insistent rat-a-tat on the rim of a snare, flame and flame's gnarled ignition. Here wonder and menace meet and reconnoiter, a singular, major addition to an already singular, major body of work." --Nathaniel Mackey

"Investigates female and genderqueer lineage via labor smuggling and trafficking. Juxtaposing communal memory and voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas, set in a speculative future; where voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through white space and page"--

'The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker How does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe? In the months leading up to her daughter Arachne's birth, US poet Joyelle McSweeney set out to write a quiver of poems like a quiver of poison arrows: formally and sonically virtuosic, laced with the poet's obsessive concerns with contamination, decay and the sublime, featuring a crown of 'toxic sonnets' for the tuberculosis bacterium that killed Keats. But when Arachne was born with an unexpected birth defect, lived briefly and died, the poet was visited by a second welter of poems, odes of love, grief, perplexity and rage. These two books, Toxicon & Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Fluxo-Floema is a detective novel of sorts--pornographic, scatological, and spiritual--that ultimately references the failure and success of writing. It's about vocabulary, astrology, dramaturgy, science, a story within a story within a story. It's a celestial map to social interaction and the failure of connection, a crafted examination of the distortions of religion and piety. Here we, the reader, visit nonsense, pathos, violence, and the flights of fancy of human coexistence.

Praise for Vi Khi Nao: "Here I was allowed to forget for a while that that is what books aspire to tell, so taken was I by more enthralling and mysterious pleasures." —Carole Maso How do you bear the death of a child? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone's pomegranate seeds, and affairs with the neighbors. Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent's grief all the more clearly. Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khanh, Vietnam. Vi's work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her novel, Fish In Exile, will make its first appearance in Fall 2016 from Coffee House Press. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.