Help Nightboat Publish Hannah Weiner’s Open House!
“Hannah Weiner’s syncopated patterning uncovers a conversation so thrilling that I never want it to end.”
-DODIE BELLAMY
“Weiner is one of the great American linguistic inventors of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. She created an alchemical poetry that transforms the materials of everyday life into a dimension beyond sensory perception.”
-CHARLES BERNSTEIN
“Hannah Weiner was everywhere.”
-PATRICK DURGIN
Nightboat Books is raising $8,000 to help publish an expanded reissue of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, with a new introduction by Patrick Durgin and afterword by Trisha Low. Join us!
Hannah Weiner (1928–1997) was a poet and conceptual artist. In the 1970s, she began to compose “clair-style” poems based on the words she saw on her forehead, typewriter, and other surfaces. She was an active participant in the New York avant-garde and often associated with Language poetry, although her influence traveled west to the New Narrative movement and has been cited in studies of feminist poetics, disability poetics, and “outsider” writing. She was friends and collaborators with a vibrant milieu of downtown artists including Ted Berrigan, Sol Lewitt, Bernadette Mayer, Meredith Monk, Terry Riley, Carolee Schneemann, and Andy Warhol, yet her work presents a multivocal, experiential mode of poetry entirely her own.
Hannah Weiner was attuned to the social necessity of art-making, and to the spiritual and psychological forces that animate it. Interest in her work exploded after Kenning Edition’s landmark 2008 publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin. Now, Hannah Weiner’s Open House is returning to circulation with forty pages of never-seen poetic material. We need your help to cover printing costs for this new edition!
- With a gift of $75 or more, you will receive a special invitation the launch event for Hannah Weiner’s Open House
- With a gift of $125 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of the collection
- With a gift of $250 or more, we’ll also acknowledge your name in the colophon of the book.
