New Books In Literature

Kendra Sullivan's latest book of poetry, Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds. Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and coleads the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initi