The first anthology of poetry by fashion designer, musician, painter, and Paris icon Vava Dudu. Vava’s poems are culled from language she prints and publishes on garments, as well as song lyrics from her electro-punk band La Chatte. Here her texts are translated from French to English by New York artist, musician and educator Geo Wyeth, and edited by Castilian writer and curator Alberto García del Castillo.

The book was completed in residency at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), as part of the public program accompanying a retrospective exhibition of Keith Haring.

The edition comes in both blue and black prints.

The humor in Delirium seems a cross between the classic comic strip gags of Ernie Bushmiller and the theatrical absurdity of Monty Python, with a dose of Jim Woodring’s colorful, acid-trip antics thrown in as well.

What makes these strips special is that they achieve things that can only be done in comics; Virot’s mastery of the medium’s fundamental mechanics (timing, composition, closure) is matched only by his unbounded imagination. But for all of its absurdity, Virot captures simple moments of undeniable humor and pure joy with simple punchlines and and unexpected twists.

This makes Delirium a unique and special work that excels on two levels: a formal experiment that pushes the visual language of comics to dazzling and frantic limits, as well as a deeply satisfying and laugh-out-loud compendium of surrealist set-ups and visual one-liners.

Speech Choke is a collection of flash fiction written by Helena Grande. It includes letters to imaginary lovers, speculations, absurd official events, digital ghosts, social fears, anxiety, theatrical interludes, and odes to kissing. Speech Choke expresses a feeling of categorical displacement, a state of being unable to communicate verbally and reach the outside world. Speech Choke is an experiment in the interplay between desire and the failed attempts to fulfil it.

Format Paperback | 80 pages
Dimensions 125 x 190 mm
March 2020

Created by black women artists, this dynamic workbook can help you shift joy from a feeling to a practice. Engage its prompts, reflections, and resources for personal and creative transformation!

Compiled by Gabrielle Civil with contributions by Call & Response Artists Gabrielle Civil, Duriel E. Harris, Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, Rosamond S. King, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Miré Regulus and Awilda Rodríguez Lora.

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work.

Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Nadinne Natalia and MJ Balvanera.
First edition published August, 2019, edition of 300.

Decolonizing NVC is a workbook stocked with activities, exercises, and ideas to explore our relationship to communication, our bodies, and each other. Using a trauma-informed approach, this workbook encourages readers to deepen our emotional vocabularies so that we can work towards a more enlivened, healthy interdependence.

Written by meenadchi. Edited by Nicole Kelly. Design by MJ Balvanera. Infographics by Hana Ward. Binding by WCCW Staff & Cynthia Navarro of Tiny Splendor.

Typeset in Sofia Pro by Olivier Gourvat from Monstardesign and Agentur Regular by Good Type Foundry. 

First edition published March, 2019, edition of 200.
Second printing of First edition in June, 2019, edition of 500.

Published by CO—Conspirator Press with the support of the Women’s Center for Creative Work. Printing by Nadinne Natalia, Lindsey Lee Eichenberger, and Cynthia Navarro at the Women’s Center for Creative Work. 

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses eleven chapters that recount Douglass's life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man.

More info on domainbooks.org

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge. An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.

More info on www.domainbooks.org

Foregrounding the slippages between doing and undoing or not doing, speech and movement-based forms of address, and improvisation and the score, Lauren Bakst traces the forms performance takes, be they in our everyday experiences, intimate and personal relationships, memories, or on stage.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Working at the interstices of language and movement, Bakst stages critical phenomenologies of performance. Her video, publication, and performance works have been commissioned by BAM/Wendy's Subway, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and Pioneer Works. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts School of Dance, where she is currently curating The School for Temporary Liveness, to which rile* was invited to participate in its second edition over the spring of 2020.

The Immeasurable Want of Light is a collection of many short plays drawn from Mubashshir’s two-year personal practice of writing a play a day to capture and express the ever-shifting perspective of living in black skin. Inspired by Chris Ofili’s Afro Muses, each play is distinct in subject, form and tone, presenting a constellation of theatrical portraits.

Daaimah Mubashshir is based in NYC. Awards include a 2019 Core Writer Fellowship at The Playwrights Center (MN), a 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, and a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Other published works include The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and Molasses and A Blue Coat (Kenyon Review). www.daaimahmubashshir.com

Blending epic tragedy, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk, Is God Is is a revenge tale about twin sisters. In this award-winning work by playwright Aleshea Harris, emotions are laid bare through dialogue and visual gaps in language.

Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine and was nominated for a Drama Desk award.

Mixing live performance with algorithms and interfaces, A Piece of Work is the second project in Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic theater” series. A digital Hamlet for a post-humanist age, A Piece of Work deploys a set of ingeniously designed computer algorithms to generate real-time adaptations of Shakespeare’s original play. New scenes, songs, scores and visuals emerge from an intricate web of technology. With an introduction by Dorsen, and screen-shots of the system as it runs, this book elaborates both the technological and the poetic procedures of algorithmic theater.

Annie Dorsen is a director and writer, whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance.

Through a series of prayers, invocations, and hymns, Syncope eulogizes those who have perished making Central Mediterranean crossings as well as collects first-hand accounts of those who have survived these perilous journeys. Forces of fate brought errant lives together for a hopeful safe passage and ultimately, linked these lives in their untimely deaths. Syncope attempts to shed some light on these lives, as well as the happenstance of living and dying while trying to cross a border.

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, published by Nightboat Books in 2018, day pulls down the sky… a filament in gold leaf written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (2019, Belladonna/ Danspace), and Syncope (UDP 2019). Her collection No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books) is forthcoming in 2020. Asiya teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library.

As the founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a legendary figure in the history of art and contemporary dance. Though influenced by Western artists and writers—the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others–he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II.

In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. Costume en Face is the first publication of one of Hijikata’s notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata’s process of composition.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born in Japan in 1928. He founded the radical dance form known as Butoh, which requires dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Even after his abrupt death in 1986, his dance works and writings continue to be extremely influential.

Taking as its starting point an ultimately failed attempt to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Chronology explores the spaces language occupies in relationships, colonial history, and the postcolonial present. It is a collage of images and documents, folding on words-that-follow-no-chronology, unveiling layers of meaning of queering love, friendship, death, and power. Traveling from Cape Town to the Schomburg Center in New York, Zahra Patterson’s Chronology reveals and revels in fragments of the past-personal and the present-political.

Chronology was awarded the 2019 LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography.

Zahra Patterson is a writer and educator. Her short fiction has appeared in Kalyani Magazine and The Felt, and a reading of her play, Sappho’s Last Supper, was staged at WOW Café Theatre. She learned postcolonial theory in the bookshops of Nairobi and the bars of Cape Town and has an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute.

Rosa Alcalá's new poemario MyOTHER TONGUE begins in the archives of what has yet to be written. She writes with precision and dynamism from the borders between death (of a mother) and birth (of a daughter). What a body produces, and what produces a body: labor, trauma, memory, sacrifice, pain, danger, and language formed both on the tongue and in the culture and the spaces between what can be said and what is missing, the linguistic and existential problem of not having the right words. The darknesses in Alcalá's work emerge from what happens when we don't see ourselves in the languages that both form and destroy us as we labor in this 'dream called money.' Alcalá is a {un}documentarian of the highest order, a {un}documentarian of what history and memory try to erase. Her poems are urgent, demanding and haunting.
—Daniel Borzutzky

Rosa Alcalá is the author of Undocumentaries and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters.

Near, At follows the inherent strangeness of one’s consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, Near, At traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called MY CHRISTOPHER POEMS, this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be.

"Jennifer Soong’s collection displays her nuanced understanding of how the philosophical-treatise-as-poem can birth an emotional and embodied intelligence, placing her in a line of affinity with contemporary writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson and Anne Boyer. Simultaneously, Soong accomplishes something utterly unexpected in 2019: she casts a harpoon into the New England landscape poem ­– long linked to the genteel, the male, the WASP – and brings it vibrant and expansive into the twenty-first century. Certain poetry collections are written to be 'of the moment,' but a collection such as Near, At is written to give pace to those moments, with each carefully placed word a further step taken by the poet and reader together. Come near, these poems tell us, and we feel we’ll arrive at exactly the time and place we need to be."
—Mia You

Established in 2016, Hotel is a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non fiction & poetry. Hotel features work from established & emerging talent.Hotel provides the space for experimental reflection on literature’s status as art & cultural mediator.

Detour/Détours imagines debt as a language game: as a broken pun; a break in a journey; a play on value and the meaning of money as it changes hands. Or in terms of Guy Debord’s détournement—as a debt reimagined through the integration of old works into something new.

The word debtor owes etymologically to the old French deteur. But—moving into English—its first appearance dates back to the early 13th century and— sounded out as dettur, dettour or detour—debt can be read as an elaboration on the mottled intimations of a detour with a little poetic license. A detour is a deviation, a digression; a play on our various senses of direction. Exploring the will, want or need to take the long way around—and seeking to bastardize and scrutinize our relationship with (and conceptualization of) a statement of debt—here we have a set of searching works that critique all our methods of repayment. Participating authors were given free rein to produce a piece of writing in response to these ideas, and the works included herein—five first English-language translations and five original texts—wind their way around the weight of the word ‘debt’ in ten attempts to reroute its meaning.

Questions of Worth by Noémi Lefebvre, translated by Natascha Lasorak and Sophie Lewis
Silent B by Lauren Elkin
A Problem of the Greek Type by Mathieu Larnaudie, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Emotional Debt/Speed of Recovery Matrix by Selma Dabbagh
Debt Night by Preti Taneja
The Pastoral Calculation by Sandra Lucbert, translated by Jessica Spivey
The Debt Collector by Jen Calleja
Unknown Soldier by Nicolas Bouyssi, translated by Amanda DeMarco
Good Relations by Joanna Walsh
Out of Debt by Thomas Clerc, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Edited by Emmanuel Bouju, Dominic Jaeckle & Cécile Menon
Limited Edition of 300 copies
180 x 120, paperback, 78 pages

A collection of new poems following their (Soma)tics practice.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

A collection of poems from their book Post Meridian.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

Collected poems by Heather Christle.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

"A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry."

A slippery novel set in the Bay Area of the early aughts, where femininity, race, and class tangle together.

Neotenica is a novel of encounters: casual sex, arranged-marriage dates, cops, rowdy teenagers, lawyers, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs. At the center of it are Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned PhD student, and her husband, a Korean-American male who inhabits an interior femininity, neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. This novel is an adrenaline-filled ride sliding across the surface of desire and chance through the quotidian turned playful.

A vernacular debut that uncompromisingly journeys towards its sole destination: the decolonization of the imagination. 

In Invasive species, Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees—the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.

Bruce Boone Dismembered collects nearly five decades of writing by Bruce Boone, a founder of New Narrative and critical figure at the crossroads of late-twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. At once sexy and political, gossipy and scholarly, this crucial volume includes poems, stories, essays, interviews, and reviews.

In a time of disorder and disease, Boone’s body of work acts as a mirror to our dismembered global reality. This scavenged, collaged, taped-together collection provides a “map to negotiate perils” and guides us toward reconciliation with perilous futures. This book exemplifies the poignancy that might emerge from the found and frenetic.

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

French edition of Laura Mulvey's writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet, to an extended engagement with the creations of Native American artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work. 

Translated from the English by Guillaume Mélère. 
Preface by Clara Schulmann.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines' first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.

Life not as singular and individual, but entangled and connected. 

Featuring a poem by Hanne Lippard, an interview with Dope St Jude, 6 Q&A's with IG Meme LGBTQ+ accounts, Selected Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory’s ‘Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects’ by Chris E. Vargas, an interview with Marilyn Waring, BUTCHCAMP, an essay Nina Lykke, (radical) self-care: biography of a network, a fashion shoot 'Gluck, Hig, Tim, Grub, Peter' photographed by Ilenia Arosio, an essay by Nadia Hebson, WICKED TECHNOLOGY/WILD FERMENTATION by Sara Manente, a Second Skin Harness by Sara Manente, Inju Kaboom and Gunbike Erdemir, Feminism, He-Yin Zhen and Reconceptualizing China’s History: A Brief Comment by Rebecca E. Karl, Thunderclap by Amy Suo Wu, an interview with Amy Sillman by Melissa Gordon, Some Women Want to Have Their Cock and Eat It To by Jill Johnston, (Post)Menopausal Graphic Design Strategies by Rietlanden Women’s Office and the essay Sex in Texas, anticipated by Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

In 1987, artist and poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014) and her partner, painter Arakawa (1936–2010), formed the Architectural Body Research Foundation (later to become the Reversible Destiny Foundation)—an architectural office pursuing the radical conviction that architecture would provide humanity with the necessary tools and training to overcome death. Their wide variety of theories investigated how a person might interact with their environment, and how that environment might condition and enhance the body to increase its capabilities—through a constant undoing and unsettling of subject formation. Taking the work and writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa as a broad provocation, The Floor Is Uneven. Does It Slope? aims to swallow and masticate the duo’s thought into a new sort of pulp: a collective fan fiction work. Less a book about Gins and Arakawa than a book after them, it tries to seed their work to various fans—writers and makers indebted to the duo’s thinking or suspected to be enthralled by it. 

Contributors speak about Gins and Arakawa through the language of their own practice, through academia, poetry, essays, photography, experimental writing, and fiction—thinking about what Gins and Arakawa might mean to their individual fields. 

Texts by Henry Andersen, Lila Athanasiadou, Ben Thorp Brown, Lucas Crawford, Bryana Fritz, Laura Herman, Daisuke Kosugi, Joyelle McSweeney, Simone C. Niquille, Andros Zins-Browne.

In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XECLOGUE is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work.

With an introduction by Ali Smith and a new afterword by Nell Dunn.

In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love. The novelist Ann Quin says she appears to be a 'singular girl, singular and single’ but questions the use she makes of her freedom. The Pop artist Pauline Boty reveals she married 'the first man I could talk very freely to’ ten days after meeting him. Kathy Collier, who worked with Dunn in a Battersea sweet factory, talks about what it takes to 'get out’ of a life that isn’t fulfilling. Edna O’Brien tells us about the time she inadvertently stole a brown georgette scarf and the lesson she took from it: 'Morality is not the same thing as abstinence.’