Feb
10
2:30am
Skylit: Winter Phoenix by Sophia Terazawa + Pms: A Journal in Verse by Dot Devota
By Skylight Books
Winter Phoenix: Testimonies in Verse (Deep Vellum Publishing)
A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, "Why did you just stand there and say nothing?" Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an "investigation which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers' testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order--The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Ph Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021) and the forthcoming Anon. Her favorite color is purple.
Pms: A Journal in Verse (Rescue Press)
One / writes a journal // to create the / guise of reading / creation. // It's all already / not there , writes Dot Devota in her newest collection of explosive, visionary rage-songs sung in the private-public space of a journal toward the public-private space of community. PMS: A JOURNAL IN VERSE is a radical rejection of artistic perfection and false relationship; a record of the mind's neon blaze, flickering light upon such underworldly irritants as brost psychosis, compulsive self-reflection, failed artistic support structures, and literary theory. This is a formidable, darkly humorous collection fueled by the intelligence of an electric, revelatory state.
Dot Devota (b. St. Louis, Missouri) writes poems and essays about pre-sickness, sensations in the phenomenon of "falling ill," and post-viral, chronic and mysterious illness in individual, societal, and environmental body-scapes. Her books include PMS: A Journal In Verse (Rescue Press), The Division of Labor (Rescue Press), And The Girls Worried Terribly (Noemi Press), The Eternal Wall (Book*hug), and Dept. of Posthumous Letters (Argos Books).
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