A4 review N°3

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This second issue presents texts by : Chloé Delchini, Justine Gensse, Simon Johannin and Jérôme Poloczek.

In 2015, Jacob finds himself wandering the streets, swamps and cemeteries of New Orleans. Through his search for a man named Ignatius, 'O Fortuna' tells the story of his attempt to make a film. We discover the city’s unique atmosphere and meet a bizarre cast of characters who assist Jacob with his uncertain attempts at shooting scenes of DAT LIKWID LAND.

In these poems, Samer Abu Hawwash stands upon ancient and modern ruins, engaging with the archetypal Arabic qasida and its echoes in the present, set against a backdrop of exile, displacement, and genocide. The site of the ruin, the journey, and the return home are the three movements of the archetypal Arabic form with which Samer contends in his book-length poem. 

Writing in and from the moment of crisis, the poet keeps returning to ruins, forfeiting the journey and the hope of return and resolution, rearranging the elements of poetry in the Arabic tradition in search of closure or consolation—in a gesture, a shadow, a memory, an object. The five poems that follow “Ruins” in this book root themselves in monumental loss. When “it no longer matters if anyone loves us” and “we will lose this war,” nothing remains but the poem, the witness, the signpost in the wasteland of history.

Entirely comprised of poems contained in her latest collection, 2016’s Certain Magical Acts, Live in Seattle elucidates why Alice Notley is one of the world’s most revered poets, the recipient of the Los Angeles TimesBook Award, the Griffin Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. “I am alive outside written memory” is how one of the speakers of Notley’s poem “Voices” puts it and listening to the poet read her work live, in front of an entranced audience, serves to detail the intangibility of sound vis-à-vis language.

Live in Seattle also includes excerpts of the onstage conversation Notley had with Seattle poets John Marshall, Christine Deavel and Rebecca Hoogs. Among other topics, the talk revolves around concepts of success, what it means to write a female poetry circa 2017, and the importance of always creating from a position of disobedience.

As part of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Poetry Series, Live in Seattle was recorded at McCaw Hall in Seattle, Washington on Wednesday, April 5th, 2017 and mastered and engineered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, Oregon in the Summer of 2017. 

Purchase of Live in Seattle includes a 11×11 insert of Notley’s poem “FOUND WORK (lost lace),” as well as a download card for the entire album. Live in Seattle can also be found digitally on Spotify and Bandcamp. The record itself is not black but clear.

T is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. 

From the Afterword: "Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature."

What does a poet say (what does anyone say), when placed on the stand, how answer the binary logics forced like a cage in the legally-grounded violence which splittingly interrogates solidarity, the splitting invocation of law? In answer, T spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. The author writes: “I want the whole text to be a kind of horrific inorganic body with awkward parts, both to replay at the level of form some of the critiques of organicist thinking with reference to nature that the poem tries to articulate, and also, more glibly, to be somewhat like a trans body, awkwardly fitting together with some parts undercutting others”. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door. 

The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.