A 3-page feature on the new poems of Michael Gottlieb. Start on page one here. Buy the book here.

Zone: correlations connects twelve poetic experiments that extract and recombine language from its limitless archives, generating new meanings for public and private life in our distressed present. Tyrone Williams writes, about Barrett Watten, “The value of Language writing, as demonstrated in Watten’s publications this century, is that shattering the window of language — not just looking out — was and is a beginning, among other beginnings, of thinking, if not being, ‘out there.’ ” Buy the book here.

Next! (new poems) is the much-awaited collection of Michael Gottlieb’s latest poems, joining Selected Poems (2021), Collected Essays (2023), and Collected Memoirs (2023) in matching format and design, making this the fourth volume
in Chax Press’s standard edition of this revelatory poet’s work. While, as a first-generation Language School poet,
his radical yet accessible work deeply interrogates language, as well as focusing on New York City, an eternal subject
for him, the fundamental questions he’s been asking for decades are what does it mean to be a poet and how do we
live our lives as poets?

Daphne Marlatt is an award-winning poet, dramatist, and novelist. Among her earlier poetry titles are Steveston and Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now.  Her novels include Ana Historic (Coach House 1988, Anansi 2013) and Taken (1996). The Given received the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. A Pangaea Arts production of her contemporary Canadian Noh play The Gull was awarded the international Uchimura Naoya Prize in 2008 and in 2012 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Talonbooks has published Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968-2008 edited by Susan Holbrook. Shadow Catch (Talonbooks, 2023), a Noh-like libretto for chamber opera, has received 2 productions in Vancouver, the first in 2010 and again in 2022.  Daphne Marlatt’s work has been described as including “such acuity of hush and cadence,” creating “sound that is space inhabiting her body, becoming ours” (Erín Moure). Sina Queyras has described her as “a singular voice in Canadian poetry,” which is undoubtably true, yet we think she is a singular voice in all poetry of the 20th and 21st Centuries. 

How does one exist? Do you miss me? Do you know I’m gone?

In Shard, Roitman’s contemplation of loss, tenderness, and awe, 

      the poet observes and exists at once.

Here, everything matters: the wrongful teeth, hands seen through 

      paper, the burning world, shoulders wrapped in plastic, 

      beauty as a patch.

Here: the inhabitants, known and unknown—the not-yet-dead, 

      the unjustly dead.

Here: One hand is love. Two hands are everything.

Roitman’s spare, illuminated work moves between the explicit 

      and the haphazard—the way the cursor skips like needles.

— Maryrose Larkin

Video of Oct 17 2025 reading by Will Alexander & Stephen Ratcliffe
Video of Nov 8 2025 Birthday Celebration/Tribute to Alice Notley
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