News and Events

Conjunctions:77, States of Play Launch Reading

An evening with Anelise Chen, Shelley Jackson, Arthur Sze, Tracie Morris, and Charles Bernstein

Friday, January 21, 2022

8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Online Event

[Conjunctions:77, States of Play Launch Reading]

Please join us for the online launch of Conjunctions:77, States of Play! Hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company, the evening will feature readings by Anelise Chen, Shelley Jackson, Arthur Sze, and Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein, with an introduction by Contributing Editor Brian Evenson. Click here to register!

Featured Authors

Charles Bernstein is the author of Topsy-Turvy and Pitch of Poetry (both University of Chicago Press). In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry. With Tracie Morris, Bernstein co-edited Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press).

Anelise Chen's first book, So Many Olympic Exertions, came out with Kaya Press in 2017. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Brian Evenson (Contributing Editor) is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell (Coffee House Press). His work has won the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards, and he has been a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Ray Bradbury Award.

Shelley Jackson is the author of Riddance (Black Balloon), Half Life (HarperCollins), The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor), hypertexts including Patchwork Girl (Eastgate Systems), and several children’s books, including The Old Woman and the Wave (DK) and Mimi’s Dada Catifesto (Clarion Books). She is known for her cross-genre experiments, most notably SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2,095 volunteers.

Tracie Morris's recent books include the forthcoming titles handholding: on the other hand (Kore Press), human/nature poems (Litmus Press), Who Do With Words (expanded edition, Chax Press) and Hard Korè: Poems of Mythos and Place (Joca Seria Press).

Arthur Sze received the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His newest book is The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon).

About the Issue
Published by Bard College in fall 2021, this kaleidoscopic issue on games, gambles, and gambits features new fiction, poetry, essays, and cross-genre work by Ranjit Hoskote, Joanna Scott, Shelley Jackson, John Darcy, Heather Altfeld, James Morrow, Kyoko Mori, Charles Bernstein& Tracie Morris, Catherine Imbriglio, Pierre Reverdy, David Shields, Robin Hemley, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Mackey, Anelise Chen, S.P. Tenhoff, Lowry Pressly, Cole Swensen, Rae Armantrout, Lucas Southworth, Kelsey Peterson, Arthur Sze, John Dimitroff, Alyssa Pelish, Nam Le, Tim Raymond, Justin Noga, Kate Colby, and Brian Evenson.

Contact: Linnea Marik, [email protected], 845-758-7054

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/conjunctions-77-states-of-play-the-games-issue-group-reading-tickets-229601162257

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In Print

Conjunctions:79

Onword

Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

Hunger

by Shane Kowalski

March 15, 2023

He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit.

Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite

by Tennessee Williams

March 8, 2023

When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.

The Last Ones

by Yuri Herrera

March 1, 2023

He walked for two years across the putrid surface of the solid crust: he learned how not to die by gnawing on it and how not to dissolve in its salt at night; he healed his own bones when the wind whipped him through the air like a rag and flung him onto the stiff waves.
He was perpetually dazzled by the glare, but every once in a while he glimpsed shadows beneath the crust, brooding their bodies from one side to another and bashing themselves against the surface.
Once he caught sight of an old man, inexplicably gleeful, jigging from one little plastic islet to the next. They waved at each other, arms aloft; he managed to make out the other man’s silhouette, stretched tall against the glare of the crust, and at that precise moment an enormous, jagged mouth rose up around the old man’s feet and carried him down to the depths of that filthy chowder.