On Thursday, June 15th, at 6:00 p.m., Conjunctions celebrates the release of its spring issue on architecture, Conjunctions:68, Inside Out, with a reading by contributors Elaine Equi, Karen Heuler, Andrew Mossin, and Matt Reeck at the NYU Bookstore (726 Broadway between Waverly and Washington). Copies of the issue will be available for sale and signing. The event is free and open to the public; seating is first-come / first-served.The literary journal Conjunctions, edited by novelist Bradford Morrow and published by Bard College, has been a living notebook for provocative, risk-taking, immaculately crafted fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction since 1981. As PEN American Center has it: “Conjunctions is one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines: innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful.”
In addition to work by the readers, the Inside Out issue includes contributions by Kathryn Davis, Can Xue, Robert Coover, Nathaniel Mackey, Ann Lauterbach, John Madera, Frederic Tuten, Susan Daitch, Mary South, Monica Datta, Joyce Carol Oates, Cole Swensen, and others, as well as Louis Cancelmi’s new English translations of poems by Nobel Prize–winner Claude Simon.
ABOUT THE READERS
This spring’s architecture issue will mark poet ELAINE EQUI’s eleventh publication with Conjunctions. Previous contributions available online include “A Quiet Poem,” from the online magazine; two poems in Conjunctions:19, Other Worlds; “Renga” (with Martine Bellen and Melanie Neilson) from Conjunctions:21, Credos; and her essay “Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal” from Conjunctions:29, Tributes.Her recent collections include Sentences and Rain, Click and Clone, and Ripple Effect: New and Select Poems. The New York Times calls her “thoughtful, witty, curious. A poet of transformations, exploring the pathway linking inner and outer worlds, dream life and lived life, heart and mind. She finds inspiration everywhere, in the merged shadows of people exercising in a gymnasium, a dose of Ambien or the idea of unisex colognes, in the taste of sorbet, the day’s mail, the table of contents for an imaginary book.”
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Conjunctions:68 marks celebrated literary SF author KAREN HEULER’s first appearance in the journal’s pages. Her work, hailed by Booklist as “absolutely stunning,” has been recognized with an O’Henry Prize. Her story collection The Inner City was named one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly, her fiction has appeared in such prestigious award anthologies as Year’s Best SF and Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and she has been a finalist for both the Bellwether Prize and the Shirley Jackson Award (additionally, in May 2017 she was nominated again for the Jackson Award). In Search of Lost Time is forthcoming in October of this year. ***
Since ANDREW MOSSIN made his first Conjunctions appearance in the landmark American Poetry issue, his poetry and prose have appeared frequently in both the print and online editions. Available online texts include an excerpt from his Drafts For Shelley, “The Crossing,” “The Return,” “Ode”, “The Book of A,” and “Arc XX: Paterfamilia.”Spuyten Duyvil published his Exile’s Recital last year, to celebration from poets such as Elizabeth Robinson (also a contributor to the architecture issue), who called it “groping, exalted, lamenting, resolute,” enunciating “deep poetic purpose”; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (whose new poems are forthcoming in Conjunctions’ November 2017 issue on the body), who praised the “Shelleyan lavishness and sonorous diction [of] this compelling and haunted work.” In 2018, Spuyten Duyvil will release Torture Papers, a collection that includes poems first published in the pages of Conjunctions. This book—part historical document, part extended meditation on bodily pain and traumatic memory—situates itself at the sites of Abu Ghraib prison and the Warsaw Ghetto, bringing together these culturally fragmented and disparate locales in poems that travel under the sign of Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus.
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As a translator MATT REECK has published Mirages of the Mind (from the Urdu of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi) and Bombay Stories (from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto); his translation from the French of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Class Warrior—Taoist Style is forthcoming from Wesleyan this fall. His five chapbooks include Love Songs & Laments and, most recently, The Necessary City, winner of Konundrum Engine’s 2012–13 chapbook competition. Conjunctions’ online magazine has published his poems “When the Mimes Left for Paris,” “Broken Code,” and “Vocabularies.” He is coeditor of Staging Ground, which launches its new issue this fall.
