CITY LIGHTS PUBLISHERS New Releases — Spring/Summer 2014
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THE VIOLENCE OF ORGANIZED FORGETTING THINKING BEYOND AMERICA’S DISIMAGINATION MACHINE henry giroux
City Lights | Open Media
“America has become amnesiac,” says Henry Giroux, “a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.” In a series of essays on the intersections of political power, popular culture and new methods of social control, Giroux explores how neoliberal discourse and the ongoing commodification of everyday life constitute an active assault on public memory, chip away at civil rights, and diminish the public’s capacity to speak and act in its own interests. Alarmed at the increased authoritarianism creeping into all levels of national experience, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the institutions of government and business are at work to promote mass quietism and passivity. For Giroux, widespread acceptance of the militarized lockdown of Boston crystalizes the degree to which society has come to accept martial law and mass surveillance as inevitable necessities of contemporary American life. Over-thetop repression of social movements like Occupy reveals an increasing intolerance and suspicion of those who challenge state and corporate power, while the violence marketed to youth as entertainment promotes further disconnection from a sense of cohesive community. Giroux’s book is a passionate call for public engagement as a means to push back against restrictions on freedom and the passive acceptance of a frightening status quo. Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University. A prolific author, he writes regularly for Truthout.
“Giroux is society’s teacher and conscience” —Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina pISBN: 978-0-87286-619-5 • eISBN: 978-0-87286-620-1 • $14.95 • 160PP AUGUST 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • CURRENT AFFAIRS & POLITICS
WOMAN WITH GUITAR Memphis Minnie’s Blues paul garon and beth garon
Universally recognized as one of the greatest blues artists, Memphis Minnie (1897-1973) wrote and recorded hundreds of songs. Blues people as diverse as Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Big Mama Thornton, and Chuck Berry have acknowledged her as a major influence. At a time when most female vocalists sang Tin Pan Alley material, Minnie wrote her own lyrics and accompanied her singing with virtuoso guitar playing. Thanks to her merciless imagination and dark humor, her songs rank among the most vigorous and challenging popular poetry in any language. Woman with Guitar is the first full-length study of the life and work of this extraordinary free spirit. Drawing on folklore, psychoanalysis, critical theory, women’s studies, and surrealism, the authors’ explorations of Minnie’s songs illuminate the poetics of popular culture as well as the largely hidden history of working-class women’s self-emancipation. This revised and expanded edition includes a wealth of new biographical material, including photographs, record contracts, sheet music, and period advertisements, which further vivify this portrait of an African-American musical legend. Complete, updated discography included. Paul Garon is a co-founder of Living Blues magazine, and author of The Devil’s Son-in-Law and Blues and the Poetic Spirit. Beth Garon is a painter and collagist.
“Woman with Guitar is a delight.”—Dave Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness pISBN: 978-0-87286-621-8 • $17.95 • 344PP APRIL 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • MUSIC & PERFORMING ARTS
NOCHITA dia felix
City Lights | Sister Spit
Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California’s counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancé. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope and an irrepressible wonder. Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive, and utterly unforgettable.
Dia Felix is a writer and filmmaker. She also is an awardwinning digital media producer for museums (SF Exploratorium, Museum of Arts and Design). She currently teaches and mentors teens in experimental documentary filmmaking. She is the founder and editor of Personality Press. Born and raised in California, she currently lives in New York. Nochita is her first book.
“Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence.” —Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior “In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander pISBN: 978-0-87286-612-6 • eISBN: 978-0-87286-613-3 • $15.95 • 216PP APRIL 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • FICTION/LITERATURE
HAITI GLASS lenelle moïse
City Lights | Sister Spit
In her debut collection of verse and prose, Lenelle Moïse moves deftly between girlhood memories of growing up as a Haitian immigrant in the suburbs of Boston, to bearing witness to brutality and catastrophe, to intellectual, playful explorations of pop culture enigmas like Michael Jackson and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Be it the presence of a skinhead on the subway, a newspaper account of unthinkable atrocity, or the ‘noose loosened to necklace’ of desire, the cut of Haiti Glass lays bare a world of resistance and survival, mourning and lust, need and process, triumph and prayer. Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning poet, playwright, essayist and internationally touring performance artist who creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about identity, memory and magic. Her poems and essays are featured in several anthologies, including: Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution and We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists. Her writing has also been published in the Utne Reader, Make/Shift, Left Turn, and numerous other magazines and journals. A current Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow, her plays Womb-Words, Thirsting, Ache What Make, Expatriate, Matermorphosis, Purple and Cornered in the Dark have been produced across the country. She lives in Northampton, MA where she was the 2010-2012 Poet Laureate. This is her long-awaited first book.
“Haiti Glass is a magnificent collection of poetry and prose. Part mantra, part lamentation, part prayer, this incredible book puts us wholly in the presence of an extraordinary and brave talent, whose voice will linger in your heart and mind long after you read the last word of this book.“ — Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory ISBN: 978-0-87286-614-0 • $9.95• 64PP APRIL 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • POETRY
LUNCH POEMS fr ank o ’ h a r a Pocket Poets Series No. 19 | Anniversary Edition
Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O’Hara’s freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O’Hara’s poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet’s best known works including “The Day Lady Died,” “Ave Maria,” and “Poem” [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems—casually composed, for example, in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in Times Square during his lunch hour, or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading—that made him a cult hero. This new 50th anniversary edition contains facsimile reproductions of poems from the original typescript, along with a selection of previously unpublished correspondence between City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and O’Hara, and between Donald Allen and O’Hara, shedding new light on the preparation of Lunch. Frank O’Hara was born in 1926 in Maryland and grew up in Massachusetts. He was a leader of the New York School of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. He died in 1966, struck by a dune buggy on the Fire Island beach.
“Frank O’Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene. . . . A Pan piping on city streets, he luxuriates in the uninhibited play of his imagination.”—New York Times Book Review ISBN: 978-0-87286-617-1 • $12.95 • 120PP JUNE 2014 • CASEBOUND ORIGINAL • POETRY
TENDER BUTTONS The Corrected Centennial Edition gertrude stein
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the original publication of Gertrude Stein’s groundbreaking modernist classic, Tender Buttons. This centennial edition is the first and only version to incorporate Stein’s own handwritten corrections—found in a first-edition copy at the University of Colorado—as well as corrections discovered among her papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Editor Seth Perlow has assembled a text with over 100 emendations, resulting in the first version of Tender Buttons that truly reflects its author’s intentions. These changes are detailed in Perlow’s “Note on the Text,” which describes the editorial process and lists the specific variants for the benefit of future scholars. The book includes facsimile images of some of Stein’s handwritten edits and lists of corrections, as well as an afterword by noted contemporary poet and scholar Juliana Spahr. A compact, attractive edition suitable for general readers as well as scholars, Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition is unique among the available versions of this classic text and is destined to become the standard. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was one of the most important and innovative American writers of literary modernism, as well as one of the great art collectors and salon hosts of the period. A pioneering lesbian writer, Stein lived most of her life in Paris but became a celebrity in the U.S. with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
“ . . . essential, for here is the kind of Stein that launched a thousand jibes; this represents the big break with the sort of books to which we had been accustomed, and once you have succumbed to it, you can take anything, you have become a Stein reader.”—W. G. Rogers in When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person ISBN: 978-0-87286-635-5 • $9.95 • 100PP APRIL 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • POETRY
STRAY POEMS alejandro murguía
San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 6 Stray Poems opens with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía’s inaugural address, where he provides a brilliant and impassioned poetic account of San Francisco’s Native and Latino literary history. What follows is a selection of Murguía’s most recent work, composed over the past twelve years. These are poems of the 21st century, written in a combination of English and Spanish — the patois of contemporary America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local, global. Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love, both winners of the American Book Award. He is San Francisco’s first Latino Poet Laureate.
ISBN: 978-1-931404-13-6 • $9.95 • 96PP APRIL 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • POETRY
THE TRANQUILIZED TONGUE eric baus
City Lights Spotlight No. 11 In the tradition of French poets like Francis Ponge and René Char, The Tranquilized Tongue offers a series of prose meditations in the form of surrealist declaratives, each sentence unfolding like an alchemical riddle in which sounds, images, and figures appear, dissolve, and re-emerge to offer a glimpse of a complex unconscious roiling below the surface of everyday reality. Eric Baus received an MFA from UMass Amherst, where he studied with Peter Gizzi. Author of three previous poetry collections, Baus lives in Denver, where he teaches writing and literature, works on digital audio archives of poetry, and co-edits Marcel Chapbooks.
ISBN: 978-0-87286-616-4 • $13.95 • 100PP MAY 2014 • PAPERBACK ORIGINAL • POETRY