RECENT WORKS
CONVIVIALITIES: Dialogues on Poetics
Michael Nardone with Dana Michel, Gail Scott, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Shanzhai Lyric, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes, The Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group, Kevin Davies, Raven Chacon, Divya Victor, Carlos Soto Román, Cecily Nicholson, and Ryan C. Clarke.
Forthcoming in April, 2025 from Talonbooks.
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OEI # 98–99: AURAL POETICS, edited by Michael Nardone.
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With contributions by:
Raven Chacon, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Dylan Robinson, Constance DeJong, Eyvind Kang, Gail Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Damon Krukowski, Candice Hopkins + Raven Chacon, Merlin Sheldrake, Amber Rose Johnson, John Melillo, Heather Davis, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Diane Glancy, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sophie Seita, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Patrick Nickleson, Dalie Giroux, Simon Brown, Dalie Giroux + François Lemieux, Mitchell Akiyama, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Michael Nardone, Marshall Trammell, Luke Nickel, Lauren (Lou) Turner, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato, Nicholas Komodore, Lewis Freedman, Tiziana La Melia + Ellis Sam, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Alexandre St-Onge, Danny Snelson, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Raymond Boisjoly, Max Ritts, Steven Feld + Xenia Benivolski, Tom Miller, Daniel Borzutsky, Anne Bourne, and Marcus Boon.
Designed by Eller Med A, with special thanks to Marte Meling Enoksen.
Cover Image: “Plainsong” (2020), by Raven Chacon.
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“Nardone’s poetry unsettles territories as it roves through the continent, documenting the neon signs and the billboards, the dinner table conversations, and the overheard terrors of everyday Americana. The book orchestrates unlikely and compelling movements between abstracted, parodic narrative and lyric elegy, which Nardone writes as modulated, cerebral laments for an era’s failure to reach utopia. The poems map what we drive towards, driven mad, driving round the bends in form and through the American landscape—from Pennsylvania to South Dakota to Nevada. Witnessing geographic movement as a kind of living trespass, The Ritualites impressed upon me the need for re-tuning poetry’s ethnographic ear, for transposing attention away from calcified ‘identity’ and toward living, throbbing practices of civilian life across the United States.
“Nardone’s verses seem to take their cue from Muriel Rukeyser’s citational, attentive documentation of the embodied devastations of corporatized and industrialized belts. In his parodic, aloof prose, the critical lathe seems poised to spin Lisa Robertson’s claim in her succinct poem “Envoy”: “analysis too is a style of affect.” Episodic and variegated, the book’s many voices are by turns ventriloquial and verisimilitudinous—sometimes welcoming a careful and attuned ear, sometimes shunning it; sometimes asking for sympathetic leaning, sometimes ironic distance. This is a book that wants the reader to be many-splendored and nimble. My hope has always been for poets to subscribe not to movements or schools of aesthetics, but to be the bearers of urgent form—form as a thing to be broken and held close, at once. Nardone’s collection seems to carry that urgency, seems to know artifice for what it is—a holding pattern for thought’s flight, so it can land in a stranger place, further, always, from the comforts of habit and home.”
–Divya Victor, author of Kith
“Transcription precedes essence. Michael Nardone’s The Ritualites explores writing as an interface for the found’s sounds, made new by his ingenious and generative ear, novel forms, and wry sense of humours.”
–Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss
“The Ritualites is a spellbinding collection of North America’s sonic architecture and Nardone is a poet of its topologies, listening to the air when the body stops. The Ritualites is the jukebox of place; embodied leakages of the night, the shout, the cry and the laughter. A poetics of what language lays bare: little panic breaths, sound permitted in a cell. In The Ritualites, Nardone reminds us that language is wielded and listening is a verb.”
–Jordan Scott, author of Night & Ox