Sputnik & Fizzle, a brand new small press based in Butte and New York City, will host a book launch event April 1, 2017 for its inaugural series, which features original content from National Book Award finalist Fred Moten, poet Divya Victor, and art curator Mason Leaver-Yap. The book launch event will feature a conversation with Native American poet Sherwin Bitsui, the University of Montana Creative Writing Program's current Visiting Hugo Writer.

Bitsui received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and he is the author of the poetry collections Shapeshift (2003) and Flood Song (2009).

There will be light fare to follow this event and our debut series will be available for purchase at a special reduced price.

About the books:

A POETICS OF THE UNDERCOMMONS - FRED MOTEN

Acclaimed poet and National Book Award finalist Fred Moten first delivered this remarkable lecture at Threewalls in Chicago, prompted by Harold Mendez's show "but I sound better since you cut my throat." Sputnik & Fizzle's annotated and expanded transcription of A Poetics of the Undercommons includes an original preface by Stefano Harney. Moten deftly explores various avenues of thought, explaining how he and Harney first developed a notion of the "undercommons" in their influential book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013). His is a lively and fascinating discussion of the disparate connections between Object-Oriented Ontology, Martin Heidegger's phenomenology, Franz Fanon, and Frank Wilderson, as well as the Buddhist philosophy of Nishida Kitar--and how all these various intellectual threads shaped his ideas about blackness, sociality, and the "undercommons."

SEMBLANCE: TWO ESSAYS - DIVYA VICTOR

The eponymous two essays Divya Victor produced for Semblance: Two Essays are prefaced by an original contribution by the awarapoet and librettist Douglas Kearney. Victor's first essay, "Cicadas in the Mouth," is a revised and annotated version of her 2014 Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture. Victor explores the politics of language and meditates on the meaning of being a plurilingual writer in relation to the history of colonialism. In her account, the cicada becomes a complex figure for the historical layers present in language ownership and usage. The second essay, "An Unknown Length of Rope," is a completely original essay/lecture on the history of black representation via an insightful discussion of Singleton Copley's painting, Watson and the Shark. Sir Brook Watson had lost his leg in Havana, Cuba to a shark attack in 1749 just as Cuba was becoming a thriving slave post and Victor speculates on the meaning of Copley's painting "gaining" a black actor thirty years after the incident he was commissioned to depict had taken place.

MEDIATED MONOLOGUES - MASON LEAVER-YAP

Curator Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce essays, books, exhibitions, and other events. Opening with an original preface by British artist Will Holder, Mediated Monologues is an annotated transcription of a lecture Leaver-Yap delivered at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. It is a meditation on what it means to have a voice and its relation to the complexities of queer modes of being. Leaver-Yap considers the connection between emotion, voice, and sexuality, grief, and speaking. Finally, s/he reflects on the implications of having one's voice digitized, tagged, and stored in a database for future use.