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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, time—and the dissonance in that documentation. The result is a complete paradigmatic break; Pause the Document points us towards other forms of movement (choreographies of words, absences) and meaning-making.  Her conversation is with language and its limits, illness and survival, at once playful and profound—all the while speaking to the intimacies that abound in any interaction with the world around us. She expands on those themes,…

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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…

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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 having had to reckon with the Black American Record while researching her own familial history. What she found was an absence of “legitimate” records, though an abundance of those considered “illegitimate”—a distinction she troubles to ask, “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record?” The answers abound. In our conversation below we discuss the archive, its discontents, and the anthology—which allows the past to…

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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,”…

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Funto Omojola's If I Gather Here and Shout, out this month from Nightboat Books, places Ifá divination practices alongside incantatory prose poems, to interrogate the concept of illness in a Western context. What comes…

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Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing—by Eleni Stecopoulos, out now from Nightboat—intervenes in our cultural, historical, and political narratives around healing, which Stecopoulos imagines as a "collective orchestration." The work combines cultural criticism, collaborative research, and poetic practice, all set in the context of our contemporary moment—one wherein life is commanded, consumed, made collateral. In our conversation below we discuss the project's origins and inspirations, from antiquity to the present; language as "neither defense nor apology"; and the distinction between the chronic and the acute, which Stecopoulos troubles to ask, “How do people create spaces of solidarity and care…

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