Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.
Three corpora in one, Pretty Punks forges a complex and intertwined aesthetics drawn from the American South, Irish/ Irish-American folk traditions, and the complexities of gender. "Poems" takes Yeats as a starting point and diverges with great urgency. "Portrait" offers a compelling told-tale about Louisiana bull riding and loss. "Play" features players contemplating the existential punishment of both facing and being death.
With drawings by Emma Wolgast.
Pub. Date: December 1, 2025 ISBN: 979-8-9926955-0-2
Pub. Date: November 14, 2025 ISBN: 979-8-9926955-2-6
Magra Books is pleased to announce the publication of The Cartographer’s Lament, by Dennis Phillips. Now included in this masterful, book-length sequence, Magra first published Phillips’ 17 Meditations on Time in 2021. The poet, in his Lament, seeks to capture the evanescent, to grasp the ungraspable, wrestling with that oldest and most unmappable of mysteries, time. In this remarkable project, Phillips shows himself to be a true practitioner of the impossible.
Book designed by River Jukes-Hudson with Drawings by Courtney Gregg
Detours is a poet’s memoir, serving as a record of Paul Vangelisti’s witnessing of several West Coast scenes ebb and flow over several decades, like a river, like an ocean. At high tide, there are recollections of the commingling of many different scenes as they converge where poetry is circulating, and where Vangelisti is drawn in. At low tide, narrative conventions give way to verse that reveals poetry as a fact of Vangelisti’s life, true alongside other facts and details that situate friends, lovers, accomplices and the like. By the end, this memoir invites us all to join in to “face the music and dance.”
Patterns, sounds, weaves morph, like the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of sparrows, where massed in flight together the flock shape-shifts and a new form emerges. They pose a new challenge to the flow of memory and its narrative configurations, where time is replaced by a connected sequence of frozen moments. What we mean by ‘right now’ is a mysterious thing which we cannot define and we cannot affect, but it can affect us later, or we could have affected it if we had done something far enough in the past. All that we had previously judged to be continuous turned out instead to be discrete, and the fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. There is neither a past nor a future, at least, not for me, just as a smoothly continuous linen sheet is an illusion created by its finely interwoven threads of flax or cotton. And so I thought, I will take the thread everywhere I can.
What of the Night was adapted for radio by Cyrus Lillian from Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood.
Featuring Amanda Davies as Fiona, Norbert Weisser as Felix, William Wintersole as Doctor O’Connor, Marlene Silverstein as Nora, Valerie Snyder as Robin, Frederic Downs as The Priest, and Bill Hunt and Paul Vangelisti in miscellaneous roles.
Directed by William Wintersole and Paul Vangelisti, with engineering by Ed Hammond.
This performance was first broadcast on KPFK on January 12, 1982. Special thanks to Pacifica Radio Archives for their generous support. Explore their extensive collections here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org
Brought to you by Magra Radio, an infrequent broadcast experiment of Magra Books.
This recording features Shelly Parsons as Lula, and Winston Butler as Clay, with a special appearance by Joe Clark as The Drunk.
The score was composed and performed by Bob Fraser. Directed by Paul Vangelisti.
This performance was first broadcast on KPFK on January 12, 1982. Special thanks to Pacifica Radio Archives for their generous support. Explore their extensive collections here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org
Brought to you by Magra Radio, an infrequent broadcast experiment of Magra Books.
The innovative voice of this first book doesn’t settle for a display of prowess, but embodies a young poet’s attempt to discover, in the words of Ezra Pound circa 1912, “a language to think in.”
A film poem by Corrado Armanetti, based on Paul Vangelisti's "Green Wind," written and shot in the Lunigiana region of northwestern Tuscany. 2025. Color. Running time: 6:19.
Edited by Bill Mohr.
Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-1-9
Pub. Date: April 15, 2026