Dear friends:

We are pleased to announce two new Letter Machine Editions titles:

Farid Matuk's This Isa Nice Neighborhood

and

Juliana Leslie's More Radiant Signal
You can purchase both for $20 (including shipping!) here:
http://www.lettermachine.org/

They are also available individually here for $14 each:
http://www.lettermachine.org/purchase.html

On Matuk:

Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? This Isa Nice Neighborhood, Farid Matuk’s first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined.


Farid Matuk was born in Peru to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father; he has lived in the U.S. since the age of six. Matuk is the auther of Is it the King? (Effing). His poems have appeared in 6 X 6, Barrelhouse, The Boston Review, Big Bridge, and Cannibal, among others. His essays and reviews have appeared in Sentence, Cross-Cultural Poetics, and The Poerty Project Newsletter. Matuk has published translations from Spanish in Kadar Koli, Bombay Gin, Translation Review, and Harvard Review. The recipient of Ford and Fullbright Fellowships, Matuk holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. He lives in Dallas with the poet Susan Briante.



On Leslie:

A chair by Charles and Ray Eames. A painting by Paul Klee. A sentence by Virginia Woolf. Juliana Leslie’s debut collection More Radiant Signal broadcasts its elegant, probing lyricism here, among the panoply of those who worked to house extended thought in moments of compressed articulation. With haunting, painterly logic, Leslie’s poems offer a world where the equivocal beauty of algebra and the aerodynamics of paper planes meet “a windowpane in love/ with a bright whirligig” to show that “[t]he boundary of the sky is a touchstone for enunciation.” Is there such a thing as an impossible object? And if not, how is that after reading More Radiant Signal it sits there perfectly in the center of the room.




Juliana Leslie was born in Cooperstown, New York and currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. She holds degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz; Mills College; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is her first book.

New chapbooks from Fred Moten and Peter Gizzi are forthcoming in the spring, along with Edmund Berrigan's memoir Can It! due out next fall 2011.


Our books are also available at SPD, and we'll see you in the Table X fray at AWP in DC this year.


Many thanks,
JMW & NEG
http://www.lettermachine.org


http://www.lettermachine.org/