Black Ocean :: Undercurrents

publishes new and compelling voices in literary nonfiction. From lyric essays to manifestos and poetics, the series combines criticism, meditation, and reflection to experience elevated modes of consciousness and vital ways of operating in the world. Undercurrents launched in December, 2019 with Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection, The Word Pretty. The second title in the series was Anaïs Duplan’s award-winning collection of essays and interviews, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture. The next installment will be I Create Like the Word: Poetry in the Age of Machine Intelligence, an anthology of essays and ekphrastic writing that engages with AI.

Black Ocean :: Moon Country

The Moon Country Korean Poetry Series publishes new English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by both mid-career and up-and-coming poets who debuted after the IMF crisis. By introducing work which comes out of our shared milieu, this series not only aims to widen the field of contemporary Korean poetry available in English translation, but also to challenge orientalist, neo-colonial, and national literature discourses. Our hope is that readers will inhabit these books as bodies of experience rather than view them as objects of knowledge, that they will allow themselves to be altered by them, and emerge from the page with eyes that seem to see “a world that belongs to another star.”*  Collections by the poets Kim Min Jeong, Lim Solah, Moon Bo Young, and Lee Young Ju are forthcoming.

 *From the poem “Moon Country Mischief” by Kim Soo-young