Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series V

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Poetics. Translation. California Interest. African & African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Featuring Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac. Edited by Gabrielle Kappes, Alex Wermer-Colan, Zohra Saed, and Kai Krienke, with General Editor Ammiel Alcalay.

LOST & FOUND: THE CUNY POETICS DOCUMENT INITIATIVE publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY. LOST & FOUND SERIES V is a collection of 5 chapbooks featuring Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac: four major writers responding to sweeping socio-political shifts around the globe. While working at a strip club in Times Square in 1972, Kathy Acker writes Homage to Leroi Jones and other "exercises," as part of an effort to map her "total present consciousness." In The Travel Agency is on Fire, William S. Burroughs performs cut-ups on authors related to his personal canon and ranging from William Shakespeare to Anthony Burgess. Across the ocean, Algerian poet Jean Sénac writes Le soleil sous les armes [The Sun Under the Weapons], a revolutionary manifesto urging for nothing short of total cultural transformation. Traveling between Moscow to Tashkent in 1932, Langston Hughes befriends, photographs, and translates the works of young poets writing in Uzbek in his travelogues, excerpted here as part of Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan. Edited, annotated, and with accompanying essays, The London Review of Books calls this "a serious and worthy enterprise." Diane di Prima calls the series "a gold mine" and Joanne Kyger writes: "What a brilliant cast of characters. Just exactly what one (myself) would like to read."

SERIES V includes:

Kathy Acker: Homage to Leroi Jones (ed. Gabrielle Kappes)

Jean Sénac: The Sun Under the Weapons, Correspondence & Notes from Algeria (Parts I & II) (ed. Kai Krienke)

Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan (ed. Zohra Saed)

William S. Burroughs: The Travel Agency is on Fire (ed. Alex Wermer-Colan)