Blog
Post: Engaging Black Poetics: Authors & Interns Part 2
As a publisher of experimental and genre-bending works, Nightboat is indebted to Black literary and linguistic innovation. Black authors have often been at the forefront of movements that have allowed for greater freedom in language and writing. In our relatively short history, we have published some of these groundbreaking works. We intend to continue seeking […]
Post: Echo 3
Resonance* began as a reaction, a response to a global call-to-action, a scrambling to articulate a rapidly changing world. And as we settle into a world in which tumult, turbulence, and transformation are everyday occurrences, we settle into the constancy of our bodies. What is similar about sound (an echo) and the body is that […]
Post: Engaging Black Poetics: Authors and Interns
Today is Juneteenth. The Civil War had ended years before enslaved people in Texas were notified. With the Black Lives Matter Movement going strong, we acknowledge how much work there is still left to be done. Nightboat would like to take a moment to engage with Juneteenth’s connection to Black poetics that often engage otherness […]
Post: Echo 2
An echo is a sound wave a surface reflects. A voice ringing off the walls of a canyon or a cave. How might sound, language, sun, create vibrations similar to physical proximity? “I love you. I won’t touch you,” Allison Cobb ends Echo 1. In this second iteration of Resonance, we’ll pick up where we […]
Post: Echo 1
We at Nightboat find ourselves reflecting on how in times of crisis, global or not, we turn to the literature of disaster and the disenfranchised. In this language we also find notes of celebration, powerful beacons of hope, and exemplars of resistance. In the search for what resonates, we understand that inextricable from survival is […]
Post: people in space by Aldrin Valdez
I’ve been making these small works on paper. A simple way to describe what they depict is: people in space. In each drawing/painting, a figure exists in an ambiguous setting—or perhaps: exists ambiguously. Are they isolated? Are they stationary? Alone? About to move? What are they doing? How do they feel? I’m used […]
Post: Tender Points: An Interview with Amy Berkowitz
Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points reads as a lyrical essay, with fragments of personal anecdotes, philosophical thought, excerpts from online forums, and as a slow unfolding and investigation into two interconnected traumas. Berkowitz’s prose and its form evoke the discrepancies and uncertainties of living with an “invisible” and “mysterious” illness. Probing the realities of such an existence, […]
Post: Taking a Look Back On Our Interns, Fall 2019!
Our interns make the Nightboat world go ’round! Each Fall, Spring, and Summer we host interns who are interested in learning about the independent publishing world in a hands-on, intellectually stimulating environment deeply enmeshed in the writing scene here in our beloved New York City. We love building community and cherish the opportunity to meet […]
Post: Grabeland: An Interview with eteam
For a book whose title invokes a function (grabeland means “land for digging”), eteam’s art novel reads like a travelogue, touring the inner exiles of its characters as they test the limitations of their existence. The novel lives somewhere at the intersection of the Internet and land art, in a country that no longer exists, […]
Post: The Making of SPEECH: Reflections on Abu Dhabi, Walking, Weaving, and Poetry
By Jill Magi I live in a high rise building in Abu Dhabi called Sama Tower; sama means “sky” or “heavens” in Arabic. From my writing desk I look down on parking lots and streets and alleys where I see people making their way on the diagonal, diverting from the grid as they go. There […]
Post: A Little More Red Sun on the Human: Gillian Conoley on Her New and Selected Works
Here at Nightboat we have the pleasure of sharing with you all A Little More Red Sun on the Human, a collection of new and selected poems from Gillian Conoley. This collection features the classic and southwesterly “The Invention of Texas,” a poem originally from Some Gangster Pain with Carnegie Mellon University Press, alongside a […]
Post: The Language of Alisoun: In Conversation with Caroline Bergvall
“The pleasure that people feel about that character, Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, is tied in with her voice, the way she speaks and fights, she just marches on with all the knowledge and inventiveness at her disposal. That was my starting point“—Caroline Bergvall On October 16, 2019, Caroline Bergvall celebrated her now-launched Alisoun Sings at […]