Mark Nowak

Award-winning poet Mark Nowak returns with a harrowing documentation of the expansive landscape of MAGAmerica. Told through five abecedarian prose sections, . . . AGAIN is a photo-text commentary on MAGAism in America. In his sobering voice, Nowak captures the depredations of capitalism, the desensitizing regularity of mass shootings, and the extremism that has fueled white nationalism. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection through Donald Trump’s re-election, Nowak chronicles the transformations as the seasons change around him, attempting to make sense of a bitterly divided nation that elected a polarizing figurehead . . . again.

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America's most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation's curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature," Mark Nowak regularly leads transnational poetry workshops between American and international trade unions. The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog.

* "Mark Nowak encounters the whispers of creation and cultural remembrance in his eminent, visionary poetry.Revenants is an original return to a splendid ethos of ancestral word patterns, and the images bear the solemn pleasures of time, place, and singular landscapes." -Gerald Vizenor * "One of the most original collections of poetry I've read in years. In it, the curling smoke of myth mixes with the smoke from cooking sausages, and heavy steps of history are crisscrossed by the indelible birdtracks of particular places, recorded by the poet in his fieldnotes. Polish words, photographs, documentary quotations, and a deeply intelligent attention to `the multiple truths//apparent in others' lives' set this book apart from any other. Nowak's canny, peripatetic sentences break off in medias res, repeat and extend themselves, or gather into anaphoric chant rhythms. His poems are a new way of reading the world." -Forest Gander