Poetry | $10.00

Perfect-bound, 30 pages, 7 x 8 in.

SOLD OUT

Navigational Clouds Book Trailer

The adventure goes something like this: It’s 2015, the world is strange, the door is halfway open, our way… guarded by fountains, let’s defy the catastrophe of borders, let’s defy gravity. Let Gregorian’s poems be your guide, your companion, your consolation, and your stimulating secret. I love these poems. — Dara Wier

In Navigational Clouds, Alina Gregorian is a poet-cartographer mapping states of curiosities and wonder. These poems are delightfully small, yet panoramic at the same time. Reading them, you are as likely to lose as find yourself, while drifting among “papier-mâché hotels” under a sky “filled with feathers.” These are songs of affection and estrangement. “You are not the person you said you were yesterday,” but you may discover you like that feeling very much. — Elaine Equi

It keeps getting harder to tell real from unreal, past from present, ideas from things. But I’m grateful we have Alina Gregorian’s Navigational Clouds to remind us that the need for such distinctions is probably overrated. “Bring me to the border,” a voice says, because that’s where these poems are gathering. Reader, you should go and see them. They’re reinventing beauty over there, where it all crashes together and drifts apart. — Mark Bibbins

 

Navigational Clouds

You wear a cravat on the most Indiana day.
When you go outside a person greets you,
someone with jpegs and a lot of external motivation.
You ask this person if they have a folder in the revolution.
This person shares stories about building houses in the sky.
Researching nouns in address books.
Forging through half existing galaxies,
and those found under the radar of strong arguments.
You ask this person if the weather is certain.
If the rain is solitude. If they know how a citizen feels
when placed in a hallway with no doors.
Does this person feel like this, too, you want to ask.
But instead you say: “Bring me to the border.”
And this person takes you to a ship, gives you laughter,
and paints molecules in your hair.

 

Alina Gregorian is the author of Flying Bark (Coconut Books, 2016) and the chapbooks Navigational Clouds (Monk Books, 2015) and Flags for Adjectives (DIEZ, 2015). She curates Triptych Readings, runs a video poetry series on the Huffington Post, teaches at Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn.