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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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Blog |
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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April 30, 2019

Chad Sweeney On “Little Million Doors”

Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly said of Chad Sweeney's stirring new book, Little Million Doors: "Sweeney masters the art of understatement in this book of forthright and delicate poems...What knowledge we gain, the poet hazards,…

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April 30, 2019

jayy dodd’s “The Black Condition ft. Narcissus” Playlist

One of our favorite books this spring at Nightboat is jayy dodd's The Black Condition ft. Narcissus. By way of the classically fatal beauty Narcissus, jayy has fashioned a collection of poems that is at once biting and delicate, biblical and diurnal.  Parallel to her poetics, jayy works within the myriad mediums of performance art, often utilizing music and sound in those latitudes. jayy selected some poems from the book, and we chose some of our faves, to collect into this unofficial The Black Condition ft. Narcissus playlist. Take a listen and get your copy now! --   "I Know I've Been Changed"…

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Contests |
April 22, 2019

Call for Submissions: Radical Trans Poetics Anthology

WHAT: Nightboat Books is excited to invite submissions for an anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, co-edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. By “radical” we mean to suggest two overlapping aims, both political and aesthetic. Politically, we’re interested in assembling poetry and poetics united against capitalism, racism and empire, in a horizon of gender and sexual liberation. We’re excited by poetry that emerges from, travels alongside, encompasses or corresponds with collective struggle and movement. We believe that poems can think ambitiously about the heinous bullshit we fight and how we fight it, so we’re curious about writing that’s as ferocious, unrestrained,…

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