The Gift of Death

It's the opening. We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence.

—Eileen Myles

Lucy, when you waited until we got to the vet’s office to bleed-out on me, and when I thought that your blood was piss or shit pooling in my flip-flop, this was so typical of you, you never whimpered until that last day, your “one bad day” the vet kept repeating in hopes of consoling me

In this totally unsanitary way all I wanted was to mix your blood with mine, keep feeling its warmth on my foot and not wash it off, the memories of the dead being what fuels every revolution inside us, which is to say, it is love that truly accounts for any permanent sense of revolution

I couldn’t contaminate myself enough with what blood was supposed to keep apart, with what the heart and love’s eyes were supposed to index, a repulsion I was never to have in fact felt at a body for that moment an extension of my own, as if you were dying to tell me I was not singular.

Robert Kocik's A Book of Protections & AUSKO (gain)

In celebration of Ubiquitous Dividend at this year's River to River Festival (sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsel and Poets House) ON has produced a companion volume to Robert Kocik's SUPPLE SCIENCE. A Book of Protections includes reproductions of drawings Kocik composed in fall 2013, for the pre-order of SUPPLE SCIENCE. For more information about Ubiquitous Dividend go here and here. We are also posting a PDF of one of Kocik's earliest works, AUKSO (gain), published by Robert Fitterman's Object magazine in 1995, including an afterword by Stacy Doris. AUKSO (gain) inaugurates ON's new Reissues series.

It's night in San Francisco but it's Sunny in Oakland

Preorder here

What would it mean to take a snapshot of a large and various literary milieu after a moment of intense activism and struggle? It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland includes a fair amount of post/Occupy poems, but also writings which channel the historical exigencies of Bay Area poetics—from SF Renaissance, through Beat, New Narrative, Lang Po, and less identifiable movements and genealogies. Many of these poems remind us that we are in a time after ‘the event’ in which life inevitably goes on, and more reflective modalities concerning the care for self and the sustainability of certain community dynamics and friendships set in. The heterogeneity of practices speaks less to a ‘movement’ or inclusive community than an ecology in which divergent practices can complement and support one another, gathering instead around the problem of how one might continue to struggle, plan, and study collectively—in anticipation of events to come.