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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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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 forth is a ceremonious shout: “Ceremony is survival,” Omojola writes. “Survival is joy.” In our conversation below we discuss survivance and its discontents; language, and the estrangement of language; and the different frequencies of their work (as a poet, performance artist, etc.), all of which resonate. The image that appears here is courtesy of the author. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I’m curious about your visual/performance art practices, and how…

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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…

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Aditi Machado's Material Witness—out today from Nightboat Books—asks the reader to reconsider the material world around them, to reveal the attachments between human and non-human matters. A flame “kisses you with the kiss of its mouth,” the sun is president, and all of it is seen by a “militantly aroused / resident alien of every which nowhere.”  In our conversation below we discuss materials as relational, plural, and contingent, and ask what that means for language and politics—and Machado's poetic practice. All photographs are courtesy of the author. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word material. Here you challenge…

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