Maureen Jolie Anderson is an artist who works with archives both as a source for material and content as well as a means towards understanding their use as conceptual metaphors for memory. She mainly works with text, photography and video. She has taught English and writing at Friedrich Schiller University and Bauhaus University. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, South Korea, Canada and the United States.
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope, 2012), and, together with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. Her collaboration with Kate Durbin, Abra, recently received an Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and will be issued as an artist’s book and iOS app in 2014. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell.
A. Emme Boyd is a poetess from Queens, living and writing in upstate NY. Among her favorite things are bubbles that endure blades of grass, that damp, stretched feeling one only feels after an hour of hot yoga, and the blur of roadside wild flowers. On her meandering and jagged path towards poet superstardom, she has won a Shields McIlwaine Prize for Poetry and her work can be found in Yellow Bird, BLACKBERRY, and Kalyani magazines.
Therese L. Broderick MFA, has served her poetry community in Albany, New York, for many years as a featured reader, workshop leader, contest judge, critique group member, classroom guest, and volunteer for the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. Her publications and awards are listed on her photo poetry blog at http://theresebroderick.wordpress.com/.
Wo Chan is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia's Area Program for Poetry Writing where he received the Rachel St. Paul Poetry Award for his work. Wo is both a Poets House and Kundiman fellow and plans to pursue an MFA in the near future. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a makeup artist by day and performs with the drag alliance, Switch N' Play by night.
Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and a member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. In Milwaukee, they are cream city review's editor-in-chief.www.chinginchen.com.
Peter Cockelbergh is a Belgian poet, scholar and translator living in Lille, France. He studied Dutch, English and French literature and languages at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven (Belgium), at the EHESS in Paris, and was a doctoral research fellow at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany), where he also was a member of a graduate school on e-learning. Editor of Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-between (Winter 2011, Litteraria Pragensia), he has just finished translating Boris Groys’s Portrait de l’artiste en masochiste (2013, Éditions Arkhê). Apart from writing on Joris, Ezra Pound, Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman and Beat poetry, he is currently editing, with Pierre Joris, both a collected essays of Robert Kelly, A Voice Full of Cities, and an essay book on Robert Kelly, A City Full of Voices (2014, ContraMundum Press), and, with Franca Bellarsi, on Alice Notley and Pierre Joris. His poetry moves between localities, languages, media and material supports, often in collaboration with other poets or artists.
Melissa Dias-Mandoly lives in Pittsburgh with her cat, Catrick Bateman. She has degrees in poetry and film studies, and currently works for the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from PANK, Vector Press, Storm Cellar, Broad!, and more.
George J. Farrah received an MFA from Bard College, NY. His work has appeared in The Washington Review, Open 24 Hrs., Ribot, BUGHOUSE, Fourteen Hills, Disturbed Guillotine, Tight, Aileron, Fish Drum, The Columbia Poetry Review; Caldron And Net, Moria , CROWD, Xstream, MORIA, Ampersand, Elimae, Blaze VOX, BHOuse vol.2, Blue and Yellow Dog, Experiential-Experimental-Literature, Gone Lawn, Los, Anemone Sidecar, Altered Scale, and others. His full length book The Low Pouring Stars is forthcoming from Ravenna Press. The poems in this issue of Barzakh are selections from this book.
Andy Fitch’s most recent book is Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard. In fall, Ugly Duckling will publish his two collections Sixty Morning Walks and Sixty Morning Talks. For Letter Machine Editions, he currently is assembling, with Cristiana Baik, The Letter Machine Book of Interviews. Fitch teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program and edits Essay press.
Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia is the author of What Do The Evergreens Know of Pining, Yawning on the Sands, This Sentimental Education and Enter the After-Garde. He was raised in Brooklyn, NY and has a degree Linguistics. He was a cook for over a decade and has studied several living and dead languages. His work has appeared in BlazeVOX, ditch, Eccolinguistics, Caliban Online, Boog City and many others. Currently, he works overnights putting boxes on shelves and spends his days writing, reading and attempting to translate poetry for an upcoming book. He is also the editor ofkjpgarcia.wordpress.com and altpoetics.wordpress.com.
Belle Gironda taught writing at the American University in Cairo for 3.5 years and witnessed and attended the 2011 Egyptian uprising that deposed the 30 year authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak. She is now living, teaching and writing in the mountains of Western NC. She follows the current situation in Egypt with horror and concern. Her current project, in progress, is a multi-genre work about politics, change and rivers, particularly the Nile River and the New River.
Philip Good is a graduate of The School of Visual Arts. He co-edited the last of the mimeo zines, Blue Smoke. His work can be found online with BigBridge, Exquisite Corpse, Tool and The Volta. His book UNTITLED WRITINGS FROM A MEMBER OF THE BLANK GENERATION by Trembling Pillow Press has been praised by Lisa Jarnot and Michael Gizzi.
Juliette Gutmann is a poet and memoirist. She lived for years in Florence, Italy where she taught English at the University of Florence and translated contemporary Italian poetry. After returning to the US she earned a D.A. (Doctor of Arts) in English from the University at Albany and taught creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She joined the new Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at the University at Albany as a full-time lecturer in Fall 2013. She is currently at work on a poetry chapbook Sepia & Wool.
Jil Hanifan lives in Albany and is on the faculty at the University at Albany, where she is the Director of the Writing Center.
Pierre Joris is a poet, translator, essayist & anthologist who has published some 50 books, most recently, Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems) from Chax Press and The University of California Book of North African Literature (volume 4 in the Poems for the Millenniumseries), coedited with Habib Tengour. Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader edited & translated by Joris and Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, essays on Joris’ work edited by Peter Cockelbergh, came out in 2012. Forthcoming are Barzakh — Poems 2000-2012 (Black Widow Press), Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG), & A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly, co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh (Contra Mundum Press). His The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (Stanford U.P. 2011) was awarded the 2013 MLA Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. He lives & works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. Check out his website (pierrejoris.com) & his Nomadics Blog, as well as his latest (pre-anthology) book of poetry Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj.
Eric Keenaghan's creative and critical work examines the relationship between poetry, politics, and intimacy. His poetry and poetics essays has appeared in such venues as Jacket 2, EOAGH, ixnay, and The Portable Boog Reader. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press), and his critical essays on global or American queer poetry, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, Luis Cernuda, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Ronald Johnson, and other subjects have appeared in various journals and edited collections. Currently, Eric is working on a critical study of anarchism and American poetry (Life, Love, and War), a volume of poems (Love Letters to My Husband), and a series of poetics essays (Etudes). He lives in Hudson, New York and teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY.
Joshua Keller was born in Seoul, but raised in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Fiction from Temple University and is finishing up his first year as a PhD student at SUNY Albany. His work has appeared in a number of small publications including TAV and Backroads. A selection of his short-short fiction is set to appear in Gandy Dancer later this spring.
Nancy Klepsch is a local poet and a teacher. For the past three years, she has curated Text as Art through the Bookmark series at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. Her own examples of text as art poetry include “Best Wishes,” a site-specific installation printed on the rubber part of the baggage carousel at Albany International Airport. A spoken word installation, “about this building,” was printed on 12, 2’ X 3’ vinyl banners and mounted on the exterior façade of an abandoned building in her neighborhood in Troy, NY, and her poem “Letter to a prison guard from a teacher” was installed on an 8’ X 10’ teacher’s blackboard in the Arts Center of the Capital Region as part of its exhibit called “Day Job.” Klepsch has had her poems published inOberon, 13th Moon, Poetry magazine, Salvage, 200 Proof and Chronogram among others.
Chad Lowther has served as Coeditor of Barzakh since Fall 2011. He currently lives with his wife in Albany, NY, where he is working towards an M.S. in Information Studies and an MA in English at the University at Albany. His fiction has been published in the Crack the Spine 2013 Anthology. He has performed with the Albany Poets, the deep-cleveland Poets, at the Sidewalk Cafe in the Lower East Side, at the Bowery Poetry Club, and was once asked to leave a bar for reading poetry to a man wearing a cowboy hat.
Nathaniel Mackey is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which are Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006) and Nod House (New Directions, 2011); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fourth and most recent volume is Bass Cathedral(New Directions, 2008); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.
Bernadette Mayer is the recipient of the 2014 Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. Mayer is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry, including Midwinter Day, Sonnets, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, and Poetry State Forest. Recently published are her works,The Helens of Troy, NY, Studying Hunger Journals and Ethics of Sleep. A former director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery and co-editor of the conceptual magazine 0 to 9 with Vito Acconci, Mayer has been a key figure on the New York poetry scene for decades.
Ryan McGinnis is a cute librarian.
Lori Anderson Moseman is the author of All Steel (Flim Forum Press), Temporary Bunk (Swank Books), Persona (Swank Books), and Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press). Anderson Moseman founded the press, Stockport Flats, in the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River. Recently, her poetry has appeared in: 100WordStory, dislocate, divide, Epoch, PEEP/SHOW: A Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality, Portland Review, Stolen Island, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, Trickhouse. org, Tonopah Review, The Volta.org.,and Water~Stone.
Michael Peters is the author of the sound-imaging poem Vaast Bin (Calamari Press) and other assorted
language art and sound works. As certain as he is uncertain of access to “the real,” he frequently tests
and probes that periphery. www.michael-peters.com
Tomás Urayoán Noel is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at New York University, and was faculty supervisor for the first five issues of Barzakh. He is the author, most recently, of the book of poetry Los días porosos (Catafixia Editorial, Guatemala, 2012) and of the forthcoming critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press).
Douglas Rothschild is most likely a poet you have never heard of, or if you have heard of him, you haven't bothered to call & see how he's doing. But you probably haven't thought about calling William Carlos Williams or Ezra Pound recently either. Herein you will find at least one, perhaps two poems, as good as most anything in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. [Modern because those who enjoy poetry from the Romantic or Elizabethan periods are often not susceptible to the allures of contemporary writing.] As for his bio suffice to note that in the life of Mr. Rothschild stuff happened. No one noticed.
Alicia Salvadeo arrived from space 400 years ago while Ryan McGinnis was emerging from a bardo spanning prehistory & Gerard Winstanley’s birth. Simultaneously, Evan Chen appeared within a mountain fissure, seemingly spontaneously, the crack in the rockface like the armpit some say birthed the Buddha. Or was his birth more profane (miraculous to think)? There was Diderot’s Salon, then The French Revolution. The three met during Brumaire, a time of much gloom and ambivalence. At night, Alicia would signal in phosphorous to stellar civilizations from the National Convention’s former strongholds. There was something about an imperious tinge to rationalist discourse and the suspension of time giving way to the suspension of place in a prefiguration of the littoral theorized after cold war, market crashes, & the proliferation of networks in the millennium. The archives prove sparse on this interval; some suspect suppression of documents attesting to a complex agential presence in assorted flash-points: the invention of photography (and by extension of cinema), the toppling of the Vendome column, the Ern Malley hoax, the de- and re-materialization of the art object, and the various political, aesthetic, politico-aesthetic & aesthetico-political coups of Rosa Luxemburg, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Jackson, and Nicki Minaj. Ryan’s whereabouts are presently unknown; he was last seen waving from an anachronistic steamship, as if in ouroboric recapitulation of some wartime self-exile – impossible to take seriously now, on GoogleEarth.
Purvi Shah furthers the art of transformation. She won the inaugural SONY South Asian Excellence Award for Social Service for her work fighting violence against women. Her debut book, Terrain Tracks, garnered the Many Voices Project prize and was nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. In 2013, she was selected as a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow and in 2010 she received a Travel & Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to explore sound vibration in Sanskrit and how sound energy can translate through poetry in English. Her work has also been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. You can find more of her work at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah/, http://purvipoets.net, or @PurviPoets
Adam Strauss has one full-length collection, For Days, out with BlazeVox Press, and
work that appears, among other places, in the anthology The Arcadia Project: North American
Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press). As well, he has poems forthcoming in the Jaded Ibis anthology
Devouring the Green: The Cyborg Lyric Anthology [Poetry in an Era of Catastrophic Change]. The
poems in this issue are from a manuscript titled Braided Sand.
Dan Wilcox is the host of the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center in Albany, N.Y. and is a member of the poetry performance group "3 Guys from Albany". He has been a featured reader at all the important poetry venues in the Capital District & throughout the Hudson Valley and is an active member of Veterans for Peace. He also publishes poetry under the imprint, A.P.D. (albany’s poetic device, another pleasant day, etc.). His own poems have been published in Post Traumatic Press 2007, Chronogram, Poetica and most recently in the anthology American Society: What Poets See, in other small press journals and anthologies, on the internet, as broadsides & in self-published chapbooks. His chapbookboundless abodes of Albany from Benevolent Bird Press of Delmar, NY is available as a Kindle download from Amazon.com. You can read his Blog at dwlcx.blogspot.com.
Editors:
Evan Chen
Eunai Joh
Chad Lowther
Interns:
Andrew Bruno
Anna Modelo
Faculty Advisor:
Jil Hanifan