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Prose Reading PeriodContests | Uncategorized |
July 10, 2019

Prose Reading Period

PROSE READING PERIOD  We're thrilled to announce that Nightboat Books is considering prose manuscripts from July 1-Aug 15 2019. Please familiarize yourself with Nightboat Books’s editorial affinities by checking out our titles. Buy our books! Read…

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August 5, 2019

Summer Reading List: Borders

  With mass ICE raids of major U.S. cities promised by an ever-intensifying racist administration, major protests at the nations detention centers after reports of astonishingly inhumane conditions and newly devised asylum restrictions, along with the recent election of Brexit-champion Boris Johnson of the British Conservative party to prime minister of the U.K., this summer has been one fraught with tension along global borders. While we should always be reading up on these particular issues, informing ourselves and each other of their components and consequences, poetry (and literature writ large) maintains its socio-political relevance in doing that very work. What's…

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July 11, 2019

Sarah Riggs: Five Questions on Etel Adnan’s TIME

This month here at Nightboat we have the pleasure of releasing a new English translation of the beloved and inimitable painter-poet-philosopher Etel Adnan's "TIME," orginally written in the French. Born of a series of postcard correspondences between Adnan and her friend, Tunisian artist Khaled Najar, "TIME" enfolds forms both familiar and new as Adnan poetically navigates the pain, disorientation, and sublime awareness of being in time—a thing illegible without place and body—with "exuberance and clarity." I quote the latter from translator Sarah Riggs, who I was lucky enough to ask a few questions of regarding her translative process, her…

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June 25, 2019

Stephen Motika in Conversation with Andy Fitch for BLARB!

Stephen Motika, our wonderful publisher, recently spoke with Andy Fitch for BLARB! Here's an excerpt: How might a sustainable small press balance promoting fugitive individual projects and cultivating a long-lasting catalogue? How might a publisher’s personal attraction to what “breaks” within genre-defying manuscripts fit amid a broader cultural moment in which “the most interesting books now are almost exclusively in poetry, experimental fiction, and experimental prose”? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them toStephen Motika, publisher of Nightboat Books. Over the past couple years, following Motika’s departure from his Artistic Director position at Poets House to take up…

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May 7, 2019

“Personal Volcano”: Laura Moriarty Shares From Her Travels

Ahead of the release of the beautiful and devastating Personal Volcano, a collection of ecopoetics that boils form into living igneous before cooling and ultimately erupting again, poet Laura Moriarty shared journal excerpts and photos with us from her sojourns to volcanic territories. The excerpts reveal a poetic topophilia and orogenic sounds of the collection we now hold.  -- July 21, 2013   Entering the High Desert Discover Scenic Byway Blue Mountain Cattle Dog Mountain Lane Ruh-Red Road Weaver Springs Lane Lake Malheur Jackass Mountains Diamond Road Lava Bed Road Diamond Craters 2 miles Riddle Mountain Hat Butte     Butte On the road   Isolating language in relation to love of a person, subject, or place or kind of…

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May 1, 2019

“Action in the Orchards”: Fred Schmalz’s Ekphrasis of Proximity

On his new collection, Action in the Orchards, Fred Schmalz remarks, "...I have resisted the tag 'ekphrastic' to describe the poems in the book. Sure, encounters with artworks (sometimes overt, sometimes oblique) happen. But they serve more as catalysts for other connections than as conceits for the poems." In further flourishing and celebration of that quasi-ekphrasis so indelible to his new book, Fred considers the spaces and objects in which Action found its kinesis. --   Because the book focuses on encounters with art, art-making spaces or art-presenting spaces (the studio, the gallery, the museum, the performance space) seem readily available in the works.…

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