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Jzl Jmz's Local Woman, out now from Nightboat, has been described as "lush, nourishing, [and] celestial." I  would add that it's politically potent (the poems comes form "an anarchist jurisdiction"), and incredibly seductive. In the thick of it is the titular “Local Woman,” an amalgamation of women Jmz embodies. Hers is a womanhood contoured by acrylics, hormones, and the political anxieties of “Amerikka,” in spite of which—or perhaps because of which—she chooses “to see the beauty.” In our conversation below we discuss Local Woman, it's origins, and language—of which Jmz writes, "My language is church meets theater meets Tumblr meets porn category." —Dante…

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Pause the Document is a pause, or a complete rupture, in the workings of Mónica de la Torre’s poetic and political work. We’re asked to consider the documentation of our lives—whether through language, memory,…

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Marcus Clayton makes his debut with ¡PÓNK!, out now from Nightboat, a genre-defiant testimony of Afrolatino professor and guitarist Moose. He emerges from a South Gate stage surrounded by the two thrashing mosh pits of academia and punk, navigating the push and pull of contradiction, performance, and language that could turn catastrophic with a shove. ¡PÓNK! fills the page with screaming lyrics, unfolds in acts, and writes in overtures to insist and criticize: “Punk can be a teacher.” —Daye Jung Daye Jung: ¡PÓNK! moves in and around (and outside of) genre; or maybe it shatters genre, to glimpse meaning in the…

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Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive is an interrogation of the archive—its forms, failures, and alternative frequencies—featuring contributions from Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, and others. The editor, Naima Yael Tokunow—Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow—comes to the project…

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What are the logics of pleasure? Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle makes, if not an argument, the architecture of one (contoured by her preoccupations—language, sound, the sacred). “I think one of the book’s goals,” she writes, “is to be true to pleasure, which means to be unpredictable, latent, emerging.” There’s a collage of references—from sonic mediation practices to religious heretics—that challenge and compound pleasure, and its discontents. Messinger expands on those references, and others, in our conversation below.  You can order pleasureis amiracle—something “ravishing and graceful,” to quote Elizabeth Willis—here.  —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word pleasure, which…

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