House House Press Launch ft. Alize Zorlutuna, Jes Dolan, and Stacey Ho

For practitioners wildering on the outskirts of poetry, House House Press hopes to be a sounding off, scheming on, and calling into what the room may look like with us and our work there together, enjoying ourselves. Join us for a reading with House House Press’s second season of titles!

ABOUT THE BOOKS:

HOW TO BE SOFT by Alize Zorlutuna
A collection of poems and images that look at ways in which power unfolds through intimacies that live in the body. Enlisting gestures of concealment, Alize Zorlutuna pairs poetry with images, some depicting ongoing performance project, others depicting alternative ways of working through the materiality of experience. The text and images move between withholding and inviting, reconfiguring agency in the process of telling.

GREEN LINES by Stacey Ho
The two texts in Green Lines stem from Stacey Ho’s ongoing preoccupation with math and plants. “Anti-Invasion Ecologies” troubles colonial and anti-immigrant metaphors used to describe so-called weeds, while the lines of Cantor and Spinoza converge into a conversation about friendship in “How to Draw a Line.” Though these topics may seem incongruous and their approach peripatetic, these texts are connected by a continuous green line, an avenue that calls upon resistance and responsibility as a means to move together.

CONNAISSANCE DE LA FUGUE : HALIBUX by Jes Dolan
What does poetry grasp when it tries to grasp a period of fugue? That depends on what it tries to hold on to: the part of the fugue that means a state, a time of debility, or the part of the fugue that means fugitivity, an untracked movement; the part that is in the world, or the part that is the world. By adopting the haibun form to take up encounters with poverty, death, invisibility and survival, Jes Dolan suggests that this is not a question of parts, but of different intensities in the grip, the poetry, itself. The haibun too, by convention, is split—first comes the descriptive delirium of its prose, and then the wit, disjunction and evasiveness of its haiku. To play on the title of Bashō’s famous book of haibun, Connaissance de la fugue allows Dolan to recount a narrow road out of the interior, in tones hard and soft, broken and whole.