September 2020
Co-published with GenderFail
Side-stapled, 44 pages, 4 7/8 x 7 3/8 inches
Designed by Be Oakley
Printed on Risograph at Wendy's Subway
Edition of 200
Sold out
About the publication
Noah LeBien’s cumflower, their first book of poems, is consumed with desire: to know the self, to make oneself known, and to undo that knowledge and the authoritative voice that shapes it. Caustic with irony, contradiction, failure, confusion, and violence—both against macho-intellectualism and the macho-embodied poet—LeBien’s poems overflow and inescapably manipulate their author. Working within and against the gauze of confessionalism and the mythos of the American Poet, LeBien confronts the possibilities of speech without authorship, vulnerability without use, and selfhood without delimitation.
About the author
Noah LeBien is a trans poet and performer living in Brooklyn making noise from poems/poems from noise. Music at https://noahlebien.bandcamp.com/
Praise
Slick, coarse, viscous, and divine—divine in that way that toes the precipice. There’s a kind of apperception that happens where terror and pleasure meet, and Noah LeBien sustains it in cumflower to an incredible, really breathless extent. These poems are spitting in your mouth and holding up a camera to capital, surveillance, work, and masculinity. We get the body in its vast textures and liquids, but this isn’t all “bloated maquillage of the hallways.” The collisions in this work radiate with haptic consciousness for those other worldly forces which shape our particular embodiments. And beyond these materials, the poems at the language level sing: “and that you’re here with me is beautiful / that this body is being that this body is pure." I'm almost startled by the tenderness but of course it's there all along, the voice entirely intuitive, iridescent in its frictions.
— Kyle Dacuyan