Black Ocean

27/02/2023

Boston! Please join us at Grolier Poetry Bookshop this Friday to celebrate the Keith Jones's ECHO'S ERRAND, with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Jill McDonough. Hosted by Black Ocean's publisher, Janaka Stucky.

30/11/2022

We’re having a Grand Opening of our new studio space at the Vernon Street Open Studios in Somerville, MA this weekend! Located in an historic 19th century brick industrial building, Vernon Street was one of the first group of artists in the Greater Boston area to open their studios to the public in 1974. The Open Studios event allows attendees to learn about the creative process, interact with artists in the spaces where they create, purchase original artwork, and discover new talent.
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Stop by the second floor, studio #18 of 6 Vernon Street on Somerville to check out our new space, nosh on some holiday treats, and peruse our backlist of gorgeous poetry titles at a celebratory holiday discount of $3 per book!
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While you’re chilling in our studio’s new reading nook, you can also view author portrait work by studio mate , who will be offering $55 off Personalized Portrait sessions to those who sign up at Open Studios.
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December 3rd-4th from noon to 6pm

30/11/2022

Boston! Come to the grand opening of our new studio space & reading nook this weekend, located in an historic 19th century brick industrial building at 6 Vernon Street, Somerville. Nosh on some holiday treats and celebrate with select titles for only $3 🎁 https://bit.ly/3gR96AH

15/11/2022

Happy Pub Day to Hussain Ahmed, and his debut poetry collection! 📖🥳 Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war.  The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “I” to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told. Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet, translator, and environmentalist. He received a 2021 Barry and Susan Hannah award from the University of Mississippi and won the 2022 Orison Poetry Prize.

26/07/2022

Thank you for covering the new collection from , CRY PERFUME 🖤📖

13/07/2022

Thanks to those of you who helped make Brian Foley’s ew book #1 in Logic & Language over Amazon! Now go support your local indie sellers and pick up some more books this week from them 📚 ❤️

12/07/2022

Happy Pub Day 🎉📕 to Brian Foley for his new (and second) book with us! A philosophical-minded and syntactically experimental book of poetry, There Must Be a Reason People Come Here is now shipping ✨

The philosopher Catherine Malabou once asked: "What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?" There Must Be A Reason People Come Here by Brian Foley is a collection of poems that attempts to answer this question by broadcasting the indirect effects of the lived condition of a subject squeezed under the structures of late capitalism.

Lines like, "Hope is a chemical, not a dream ignited in the eye / that can be heard sober." And "There is no sun here, / just habits of light" work through the contradictions of what it means to be negatively capable. It is a collection of poems that refuses to conform to the norms of what poetry is and how it must say things.

12/07/2022

Happy Pub Day 🎉 to Brian Foley for his new (and second) book 📕 with us! 🎂

By Brian Foley Paperback / 104p. / Poetry ISBN 978-1939568-44-1

27/04/2022

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Our Book of the Day is "Opera Buffa" by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Matthew Moore (Black Ocean). Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) is hailed as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, and this collection is his last testament. Reviewing "Opera Buffa," poet Alen Hamza writes, "[It] stuns the reader with its imaginative flair, energetic wit, and existential reach. The poems’ couplets employ a staccato rhythm that creates a sense of the inexorable march toward both endings and beginnings ... In Matthew Moore’s crackling translation, Šalamun marries the comical and the serious as he addresses the factness of the world in his inimitable way." If you'd like to read a powerful collection that exemplifies the best of Šalamun's experiments with surrealism, polyphony, and absurdism, stop by the store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up.

19/04/2022

LA friends! Come visit us at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend. We’ll have an exciting mix of titles for sale alongside our sister press .media 📚