Magra Books
Los Angeles | Bagnone
Publications
Recent Titles
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.
David Lloyd,
from The Event of a Thread
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.”
Forthcoming Titles
Edited by Sean Pessin & David Trinidad.
Pensive, philosophical, and prophetic, Rachel Sherwood’s Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening has been perennially discussed since posthumously edited by David Trinidad and published by Sherwood Press / Yarmouth Press in 1981. This revised and expanded second edition includes the original collection as well as drafts and revisions of Sherwood’s body of work, and other images of archival materials that complement the work’s particular timelessness.
Pub. Date: May 15, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-3-3
A World of Imperfect Haikus: Poems 2022 by Richard Milazzo is a book of poetry the author contends a “poetry lover (ugh!) will regret reading. And which I regret writing.” He believes in “neither poetry nor in the excuses that led him to “compile these complaints and lamentations, these manifestations of self-pity; existential stories out of school; an ideological bag of tricks resulting in an orgy of dialectical irresolutions, but which did not prevent me from lauding, at some subliminal level, these louche and outré characteristics. In the end, this is all you will find here.” We, the publishers, of course, beg to differ. But our opinions, evidently, mattered little to our author, unable, as we were, to dissuade him from this onslaught of self-deprecations, and ultimately from denouncing the book. A “poet with black wings,” indeed. Such is the title of a painting which Alessandro Twombly destroyed, but which did not stop the author from gracing the front cover with it. “What attracted me was the way the word ‘imperfect’ pointed in the direction of the so-called ‘flaw’ in the image, the lacuna — the damaged part, the missing part of every history, every image, every perception.” A poet with black wings, if ever there was one, “invested neither in the journey nor the destination.”
Recent Podcasts
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.
Dutchman was written by Amiri Baraka.
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.
Ends & Odds
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.
All this made a curious impression when Bukowski told me a story about his early devotion to Fante.
