Little Hill

Description

Award-winning poet explores new formal terrain in seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment. "[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition."-Brian Blanchfield, pen.org The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against. Praise for Little Hill: "In Little Hill Alli Warren's principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one ... I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift."-Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction "The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work,' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!"-CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

Alli Warren published her Poetry Center Book Award-winning debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, with City Lights in 2013. She is also the author of I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as numerous chapbooks. She has edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, co-edited the Poetic Labor Project, and contributed to SFMOMA's Open Space. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Harpers, Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.

FINALIST - CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Praise for Little Hill: "The poems of Alli's newest book, Little Hill, are wild, abundant with the natural beauty of a language that attends to her images with fierce imperative and effecting a nurturing cool ... There is a naturalism to the poems of Little Hill, a departure from the hyper-mobile, shorter poems of her previous books, unfolding an ecology of ideas yielded from Alli's wry observations and expansive thinking. ... These poems, especially now, return me to that environment beyond the confines of my immediate everyday, mindful of my connection to the language and life greater than my own but no less fragile."-Ted Dodson, The Believer "In Alli Warren's book, a linguistic skepticism-or call it a healthy sense of the absurd-is often present towards everyday 'practical' uses of language ... our mercantile language gets into our labor body on 'office time' even when granted an ostensibly autonomous sliver of 'free time-much of which is 'spent' trying to shake off the soul-draining dynamics of the workplace in tender measures of nature reverence and hope, only to be sucked back in by an atrocious manifestation of injustice. Yet, it is partially because she does not underestimate a world in which 'everything organized to deliver force on a routine basis' that she is able to suggest alternatives to it. ... I love this little pocket-book book."-Chris Stroffolino, Entropy "'Are feelings tactics? can emotional life be radicalized? can / I sweep away their ideology? what will be left?' This pocket-sized book asks mammoth questions at the scale of something held in the hand: a phone placed intimately upon another phone to charge, a 'fresh coffee'. This is solidarity enjambed with riff, 'plunder culture', sensuous imagination and lush (dis)orientation. Circling 'the cognitive hill', riffing on a unique 'Moveable C', Warren's speaker articulates tenderness, pleasure and residue intimacies in the midst of ecocide, police brutality, racial capitalism and all 'compelled paid labour': 'I lay into the fragrant air and kiss your little windows lid / by lid'. The imagery is startling, questioning; poised between survival's unequal struggle for breath and the genuine jouissance of lyric assertion against capital's cheap reproductions: 'Let this life be more than / An apparatus for producing an ever-greater quantity / Of feelings, of shoes'."-Maria Sledmere, SPAM "Little Hill is an exploration of space, but one that is cultural, political and social. Warren works the minutae of small moments, stretched as far as possible across a great distance, attentive to the immediate as the whole of the universe."-Rob McLennan "In Little Hill Alli Warren's principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one ... I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift."-Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction "The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work,' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!"-CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death "Reading Alli Warren's Little Hill, I find it incredible that amidst the relentless circulation of capital and commodities-and despite attempts to make all life yield to the logics of extraction, work, accumulation, and the entrepreneurial self-a remainder is created, that of poetry. Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism-the litany does not end there. 'I saw the death of the earth in a child's toy,' she writes. Everywhere the speaker looks there is 'congealed shit, sometimes on sale.' Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised-the question of what it means to love in times of terror."-Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism