“The towers fall and Mary Tyler Moore tosses her beret into the air,” says Wierzbicki in “9/11 Paradox.” Paradoxes like “inertia drives the working masses” inhabit these poems. Wierzbicki constantly puts her finger on the workings of societal insanities so institutionally ingrained they cannot be questioned. There can be no reasonable dialogue because, as she puts it in “Age,” we are in a place “where we all speak different languages and yet push the same buttons.” The experience of reading this book is crucial for our times; the poems are a cagily “accessible” balm for what ails us. — Stephen Paul Miller, author of any lie you tell will be the truth (Marsh Hawk Press)

There are plenty of anti-establishment writers who present themselves as wild rebels raging outside the system, or who tell tales about marginalized characters. Wierzbicki’s work offers a more bitter and more accurate takedown of many of the mainstream’s hollow idols and ideas. The deft conclusion of her ruminations is a sense of earned sadness about the tiny shifts people make to preserve a single shred of dignity in the corporate landscape, shown with such measured compassion in “Letter to a Security Guard.” — Jim Feast, author of Neo Phobe and Long Day, Counting Tomorrow (Autonomedia)

"The only porn I read is Tsaurah Litzky’s. It has the necessary je ne sait toit.” — Tuli Kupferberg, co-founder, the Fugs, author of Teach Yourself Fucking

“The bawdy tales that make up Tsaurah Litzky’s memoir serve as the perfect antidote to the fear and loathing gripping America’s psyche today. Flasher is funny, poignant, sexy, philosophical and one hell of a good read.” — Danny Shot, author of Works

“The bawdy tales that make up Tsaurah Litzky’s memoir serve as the perfect antidote to the fear and loathing gripping America’s psyche today. Flasher is funny, poignant, sexy, philosophical and one hell of a good read.” — Danny Shot, author of Works

“Flasher: A Memoir is the powerful testimony of woman/human/poet/writer/collagist Tsaurah Litzky whose life is always lived to the maximum in ways only a courageous human spirit can manifest. Written with her uniquely genuine poetic voice, the forty-two chapters can be read individually, each a precious gem with its own charm, or you can read the entire book as a big embracing ocean of dynamic human drama in one shot.the sparkling wisdom born out of a life guided by her non-conformist passion will take you to the magically nurturing world where the tides of life come in and out every morning and night individually.” — Yuko Otomo, author of Study

Until now, no one has ever written a book about how the secret grand jury system works in this country from the inside—from the point of view of a grand juror. The Trial before the Trial is that insider’s expose. Ernest Larsen served nine days on a special narcotics grand jury in Manhattan before being forced off—at the insistence of the district attorney—and accused of contempt of court. Why? Because day after day he kept trying to halt what he saw as the exercise of racialized injustice. This book, at once ironic and angry, written in the form of a nonfiction novel, brings to light what really happens on a grand jury, a factual story that takes place just a few months before the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the rise of Black Lives Matter.

"Richard Pryor said when he went to court seeking justice what he found was ‘just us.’ Forty years later Ernie Larsen again has found ‘just us.’ Through his extraordinary observations that are fascinating, engaging, troubling, really funny and a whole lot more, Larsen finds a broken system of justice that discourages curiosity and defies common sense and reason. Unfortunately, what is revealed is not shocking but the changing same: the tragic dimensions of justice. Larsen finds himself in a conundrum. While he cannot sit in judgment of his fellow human beings, he can judge a system that was meant to protect and serve." — Carrie Mae Weems

Rasken Hasp is dying of AIDS, given only a few months to live. Then someone tries to kill him.

"In Long Day, Counting Tomorrow, Jim Feast gives a panoramic view of the social chaos, community energy and despair during the height of the AIDS crisis. Many of the poet-activists in this novel face eminent death while dealing with a medical and political system compromised by money-grubbing, corporate fame-seekers. The characters try to sabotage institutions, detour their misguided efforts and uncover the truth. A suspicious- acting doctor who owns a hospice for AIDS patients that s the mystery that drives the novel, but there is a far greater mystery here: Why are we dying? An exceptional storyteller, Feast moves fluidly from one conversation to another, fracturing time and place while spinning forward with the energy of those who insist on living a vibrant activist life, even while facing early death. After the Gay Pride Parade, one of the characters reflects: The nebula. It looks like that. Like a great circle of interlocked elbows. This novel is funny, sad, ironic and absolutely a must read to understand where we have been and where we are now." — Barbara Henning

"Pareidolia's field of play is that of the questions behind the questions. Granted, as Watson suggests, a determinist science has proved humans are basically simple machines, rotors, churning a mix of DNA & biological chemicals. And granted a determinist outside of persuasive ads, sellthrough thoughts & FB solicitations have configured people into simple, will-free consumption buckets. Watson poses this question: Not only is there but has there even been a human life? And if there has been how could it survive under this determinist assault? The answer unrolls in querulous, curious infernos of seductive lyrics. Referencing (and poking) Stevens, Hopkins, Eliot & Baudelaire, these poems (like those of the last master mentioned) offer the reader the excitement & ecstasy of a sponge bath of blood in the basement of the famed Heartbreak Motor Lodge." — Jim Feast

"Carl Watson is a writer who comes from the ancient age of madness, with his singular style and approach to the phenomenon of living. Watson s work explores with an unrivaled intensity the essence of our common destiny. For those readers who really pay attention, his words are like small bobs injected into the brain and memory that we cannot defuse or neutralize. We are proud to have him in our catalog." — Benoit Laudier

The Aaron Burr Society believes it should be obvious that the People, not corporations, and not billionaires, must redefine the Common Good and decide how to use our Commonwealth to address the humanitarian and environmental crisis of the 21st Century. These prose-poem rants and striking photos by Jim Costanzo of the Aaron Burr Society document his participation in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and seek to further the Society's aims: bottom-up economics for social justice, local cooperative economies and environmental sustainability.

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2018! Our 26th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective. Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the ""New World"" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear at the dawn of this new millennium that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Children of William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus—Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few. Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo’s masterwork, The Rose, “calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art.” This questioning marks each essay in the collection, a volume that sets out to reorder, if not outright dismantle, the exclusionary hierarchies that have dominated cultural discourse for decades. Blake’s “wild children” are alive and well, and in Yau’s nimble, intelligent prose their dissonance is exactingly parsed and joyously celebrated.

A Change in the Weather is a new collection of poems by legendary downtown poet Ron Kolm, founding member of the Unbearables and author of The Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Duke & Jill and Night Shift. “A born storyteller, documentarian and wild soul, Ron Kolm brings all the insight of a keen observer of life, whether it is in New York City, the Pennsylvania landscape of his youth, or the scenarios in fictionalized collage poems culled from photographs and letters. Kolm embraces the world around him: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.” –John J. Trause, author of Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears, Exercises in High Treason, Seriously Serial, and Eye Candy for Andy. “Open these pages and join Ron Kolm, arch-denizen of New York City, as he picks his way through the lethal and potentially surreal. In Kolm’s world, dada is a verb and anything is possible in the mope-eyed bookstores and dystopic subway darknesses he traverses. Expect the unexpected. Charles Bukowski throws shade on Velvet Underground. James Joyce makes late-night calls from the dead zone. Andy Warhol is reincarnated as a potato chip. Ladies and gentleman, this is the full affliction.” –George Wallace, author of Poppin Johnny and Who’s Handling Your Aubergines, and Great Weather for Media editor and spoken word reading series host.

"Caffentzis is a practical philosopher and a pure teacher. His reasoning even at its most abstract always tends to the political. The street is his class room. The apothegm becomes the slogan, thought has its telos in action. Or conversely, the slogan (say No Blood for Oil ) becomes the starting point of reasoning which develops with the variation, iteration, and counterpoint of a Bach fugue. Its beauty lies not with the teacher but the student (you and I). This is truly vulgar Marxism, that is, it is a critique by, with, and for the vulgus, or common people (again, you and I). The word essay means an attempt, but these succeed. They succeed as addresses, as rules, as axioms, as maxims elucidating the double mystery: on one side is the sphinx, the schizoid reasoning, the tricks behind our backs, the cipher text, the code, and the fetish. On the other side are the actualities of class war the cruelties, the homelessness, the return of plagues, the sinking boats, the drowning children, the factory fires, the poisoned rivers, the collapsing mines. While the oil industry is the concrete universal of contemporary capitalism, the condition of oil and the condition of capitalism are not the same. He elucidates the foundational concepts of Marx s critique of political economy commodity, constant capital, rent, dead labor, surplus value, and the dynamic relations depending on these concepts the falling rate of profit or the organic composition of capital. These provide the monads of understanding, the irreducible elements of our situation. A moral-political black hole haunts the center, Value, whose quantified expressions as money commit the sin of naturalization but are hidden by trumpery and enforced by drones in the sky, by nuclear holocaust, by militarized police and policing military. Like the fool to its folly, Capital continuously returns to its vomit, offering us only an acocalypse of heat-death." — Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto

"The papers in this collection are weapons we use to deconstruct the politics of war and oil, to uncover the multilayered class meaning of contemporary energy policy, and are the treasure that gives us a different sense of alternatives. Caffentzis' critical understanding dissolves the fatalism of peak-oil arguments and posits our struggles to reclaim the commons as the real limit of capitalist use of energy." — Massimo de Angelis, author of The Beginning of History