Questions:

What is are the working titles of the books?

I am in between two books. My second collection of poetry FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham University Press) just appeared, so predictably it feels undone. I am completing my first critical monograph, “REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era.” I have not had to negotiate “REMEX”’s title yet, but the final preparations of FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography taught me a lot about how a title can be “working,” or not. Originally I struck through FANNIE + FREDDIE à la the Strike Debt Movement. Meta-data issues got in the way of FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography being the volume’s title though. According to Fordham’s able staff, the strikethrough would have made it impossible for the press to register, distribute, and market the book. The result? I am haunted. I cannot not see the title as anything but under faux erasure. I mean, What does it mean to re-instate “FANNIE + FREDDIE”? I enjoin active readers to “share the labor, share the work.” Strike through the collection’s title on your copy of the book!

Where did the ideas come from for the books? How long did it take you to write the first drafts of the manuscripts?

FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography’s idea and composition was palimpsestic. I rapidly wrote individual poems in the volume (roughly between the years 2001 and 2008) before ordering them into a collection. I then un-wrote or set out to ‘destroy’ the pieces. I wanted to materialize indecision or ambivalence, in effect reconceptualizing the collection as a whole. The idea of “REMEX” came in stages, too, as the last twenty years unfolded. I began researching “REMEX” in 1999 as a dissertation project. At the time, I did not realize that I was writing about what economists now routinely refer to as the second phase of Mexico’s neoliberal transition. The dissertation became something else—this book that I call “REMEX”—around 2008 when reviewing the official website of the North American Free Trade Agreement, I realized that NAFTA was implemented over a fifteen year period.

What genres does do your books fall under?
FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography is a compilation of some of my visual, concrete, and performance poetry. “REMEX” is a work of creative critical writing, an experimental art history that incidentally I organized something like a collection of poetry, too. FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography and “REMEX” are transdisciplinary, multi-mediated, feminist, queer… I hear the projects in garrulous conversation.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
For both books, the actors/actresses would have to be non-professional, ideally my friends, acquaintances, family (including those whom I’ve tagged here—Micha Cárdenas, Beth Frost, Bruna Mori, Rachel Price & Shambhavi Kaul, Brian Whitener—and E.J. McAdams who tagged me). Consider this post an open call.

What is are the one sentence synopsis synopses of your books?

In FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography, I ‘undocument’ the quotidian’s shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001 and the 2008 Great Recession. In “REMEX” I offer close readings of artwork—performance, body art, conceptual art, installation, net art, video, cabaret-theater, experimental documentary and built environment—that are attentive to place “greater Mexico” and period, the complete implementation of NAFTA (1994-2008).

Who or what inspired you to write this these books?

My six year old son Césaire (Zé) Carroll-Domínguez—the artist responsible for FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography’s cover illustration “صورة عائلية/Retrato de familia/Family Portrait”—(more than any other person) and the “atmosphere conditions” of the United States between September 11, 2001 and the 2008 Great Recession inspired me to write the collection. A critical mass of Mexico City- and Mexico-U.S. border-based artists and the “atmosphere conditions” associated with the neoliberal restructuring of the continent inspire me to finish “REMEX.”

What else about your books might pique the reader’s interest?

Filmmaker Vicky Funari once explained to me that she, her collaborator Sergio De La Torre, and the promotoras involved in the documentary Maquilapolis’s making did not intend to tell the tale of Tijuana’s bust, but, life intervened: Funari had a baby, De La Torre began his MFA, De La Torre and she had to seek extra funding, 9/11 (2001) happened, the women of Maquilapolis were juggling their own work/life obligations—everyone took a break from filming mid-2002 through 2004. And, when Maquilapolis’s production resumed, the course of events in Tijuana redirected the film. Put differently, 2000-2001 became pivotal years for Maquilapolis because they were pivotal years for Tijuana; 2000 being the year when factory flight began, 2001 being the year when one could tally the evidence of the exodus. The fact that Funari and De La Torre took longer than they’d anticipated to wrap up Maquilapolis facilitated an Other story: the apparent end of an era. Funari’s story has stuck with me because FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography ‘interrupted’ “REMEX.” I finished the collection of poetry before I finished “REMEX” in part because I had to deal with a series of ‘extreme weather events’ in my life and in the lives of those nearest and dearest to me. Still, since undergraduate school, I have ‘code-switched’ between poetry and criticism. The mediums cross-pollinate one another in my work. I cannot imagine my dissertation without my first collection of poetry Secession (Hyperbole Books, 2012). I cannot imagine FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography without “REMEX” and a collaborative project that I’ve coproduced since 2008, the Transborder Immigrant Tool.

Will your books be self-published or represented by an agency?

Fordham University Press recently published FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography. Another press is considering “REMEX” for publication (fingers crossed).

To save 20% on select titles, visit our website:

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia St
New York, NY 10014

Luigi Bonaffini and Gil Fagiani, hosts:

Poets of the Italian Diaspora: from Latin America to Australia
A bilingual reading (Italian-English)

FROM THE FORTHCOMING ANTHOLOGY:

POETS OF THE ITALIAN DIASPORA: A Bilingual Anthology
(Fordham University Press)

Readers will include: Emelise Aleandri, Luigi Bonaffini, Peter Carravetta, Gaetano Cipolla, Gil Fagiani, Luigi Fontanella, Irene Marchigiani, Fiorentina Russo, Michael Palma, and Joseph Perricone.

For more information

“Amy Catanzano offers us a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity and an open space that is motile and multidimensional.”—Michael Palmer, from the Foreword

For more information, visit PEN Center USA.

The Fabian Almazan Trio (pianist and composer Fabian Almazan, bassist Linda Oh, and drummer Justin Brown) will will also be performing later in the evening (8:30pm).

Janet Kaplan is the author of The Groundnote, winner of the New York/New England competition from Alice James Books; The Glazier’s Country was the recipient of the 2002-2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press; and Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and forthcoming in January from the University of Notre Dame Press. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships in poetry, including a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. A fourth collection of poetry, Ephemeris Time, is in progress, as is a novel, tentatively titled “The Desire of the Line.”  She is Poet in Residence at Fordham University.

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Things That No Longer Delight Me by Leslie C. Chang

Leslie  C. Chang, author of Things That No Longer Delight (Fordham/POL prize winner) and Julie Sheehan, author of Thaw (Fordham/POL prize winner) and winner of  the Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second book, Orient Point ( W.W. Norton) will be reading along with poets  Mark Bibbins (Copper Canyon Press) and Terese Svoboda (University of Arkansas Press), in the Poets House Showcase Reading Series on Tuesday, July 13th, at 7 pm.

If the weather permits, the reading will be held outside in Teardrop Park South.

Admission free

Poets House Showcase Readings are held in conjunction with the 18th Annual Poets House Showcase, a display of all the poetry books published in the last year.

The Dance of No Hard feelings

Thaw

Weapons Grade

Orient point

Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory is the story of Hélène Cixous, a young French student who traveled to the US in 1965 to study the manuscripts of several beloved authors. The narrative shifts from the original journey, forward in time, and then back in memory, tracing the importance of writing and reading literature in our lives. It’s “an investigation of the power of Literature, of the ways in which fiction keeps secret what it seems to expose, lies and tells the truth at the same time. Hélène Cixous infuses this haunting story of deception with her unique poetic style, incisive wit, and philosophical acumen.”—Brigitte Weltman-Aron, University of Florida

NOW: $12 (was $24)

William Carlos Williams once said, “A poem can be made of anything.” On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly explores the meaning of art–in our modern culture, where are the boundaries? What is the difference between art and product? Gerald Bruns ruminates on the ways in which art becomes philosophy. In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.

NOW: $13 (was $25)

The Geoffrey Hartman Reader gathers the work of one of the most revered literary critics of the twentieth century into a collection of essays spanning the vast depth of his interests, including (but not limited to)  poetry, trauma studies, Romantic literature, and modern media. The book was the winner of the 2006 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

NOW: $10 (was $40.00)

Debuting this month, Things That No Longer Delight Me is Leslie Chang’s latest book of poems. Chang was one of Poetry Daily’s featured poets, with her poem, “In the Language of the Here and Now.” The poems are remembrances of her family’s pre-Revolutionary past in mainland China and Hong Kong. Objects, from the everyday to heirlooms, spark a flood of memories and images, leading to poems rich with history and nostalgia. According to a recent Publisher’s Weekly review, Chang “reimagines lives with devotion and loyalty.”

Things that No Longer Delight Me was the recipient of the 2008-2009 Poets Out Loud Prize, awarded each year to a full-length poetry manuscript. Leslie will be signing books at the annual AWP conference this week in Denver.

New for Summer:

Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (forthcoming in June) is Fordham author Rusmir Mahmutćehajić’s meditation on the iconic Bosnian poet. Mahmutćehajić frames Dizdar’s work in philosophical questions of poetics, faith, and culture.

From Jonathan Stalling comes two titles: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry and Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry. New in paperback, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry was first published as an essay by Ernest Fenollosa in 1919. Edited by Ezra Pound, the essay remains today, nearly a century later, as one of the most well-known statements on the state of American poetry. Though Pound’s edited version of the essay is renowned, it obscures some of Fenollosa’s original material. This book presents both Pound’s version of the essay, and the full original, complete with handwritten notes and diagrams. Together, the two represent the most comprehensive compendium of the work to date. Forthcoming in May, Poetics of Emptiness expands on Stallings’ analysis of Fenollosa’s work within the larger conceptual framework of “emptiness.” The second half, on “transpacific Daoist poetics,” explores the career of poet/translator/ critic Wai-lim Yip and engages the weave of post-structural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Poets of the Italian Diaspora: A Bilingual Anthology is publishing in August, and is a celebration of the literature of the Italian diaspora. Between the years of 1870 and 1970, 27 million Italian migrants left the home country to seek new lives. For the first time, this anthology presents the enormity of this spread, featuring the work of Italian poets living in countries from Venezuela to Australia. The poems also have introductions and biographical information for each poet.

Also new in paperback is Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei dissects Heidegger’s system of thought, especially regarding Hölderlin’s poetry.

A backlist classic, Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes is James Agee’s famous rumination on Brooklyn. Written in 1939, the prose poem remained unpublished until 1969, when Esquire printed it. One of the great love songs to Brooklyn, the poem captures the burrough’s essence in its winding rhythms. For the first time in book form, Brooklyn Is also features a foreword by Brooklyn novelist Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude.