Bite Hard

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.

Personal space is understood as the distance between 45 and 120 cm that surrounds a person. This bilingual anthology brings together the work of eighteen contemporary poets who take this intimate measurement as a starting point to challenge its apparent rigidity and explore how political, social, sexual, racial, class, and accessibility factors shape it. Beyond a simple physical distance, personal space also becomes a stage where desire draws and negotiates the boundaries between the inside and the outside.

The publication contains contributions by Samuel Ace, Justin Chin, Kyle Dacuyan, Rhea Dillon, Tracy Faud, Elijah Jackson, Taylor Johnson, Nadia Marcus, Park McArthur, Nat Raha, Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Juan de Salas, María Salgado, Assotto Saint, Cedar Sigo, S*an D.Henry-Smith, Nayare Soledad, Perla Zúñiga.

Bilingual edition, edited by Juf.

JUF (Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra) explores the relationship between poetry, contemporary art, and theatricality through the organization of performances, readings, and exhibitions. They also publish online texts and a PDF series as an extension of their curatorial and research practice. Currently based between Madrid and New York.

chop is a collection of poems that center on the life and work of proto-feminist and civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer.

A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a poet, speaker, diversity and inclusion coach, and social justice educator. In 2016 she founded her company, Feminine Pronoun Consultants, LLC. Even though Treasure is completing a PhD in English Literature and Criticism, is a published writer, gifted veteran educator, and has spoken on stages all over the U.S. and in Europe, she uses her humble beginnings in the federal housing projects in Meridian, Mississippi to fuel her passion for helping college-bound families navigate college admissions painlessly and pro tably, and o ering perceptive leaders creative diversity and inclusion facilitation. Additional information on her poetry, writing, and multidimensional practice are available at: www.FemininePronoun.com.

Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu is a poem that distrusts solitary authority even as it passes through a single voice, moving from the lyric “I” toward a collective utterance grounded in labor, history, and shared breath. 

Producing the first collaborative translation of Alturas de Macchu Picchu is not incidental but consonant with its deepest claims. Attentive to Neruda’s unique lyric pressure, this new English version resists the tradition of singular, authoritative renderings by allowing meaning, rhythm, and decision to emerge through dialogue and negotiation. 

In this way, the translation does not merely transmit Neruda’s poem but enacts its insistence that voice is a collective achievement, not a solitary possession.

"Joseph Matick is a former poet, now bird. He flies over pastures and eats chemtrails as his karmic sentence for spending so many years without flying. (You still have time, kids). Remarkably, he wrote this book in Paris with Jack before his transformation into Frank 0' Hara for the front cover. This book is dedicated to his father and his son. And to all the gum chewing geniuses of the lower canal. He wrote this in the 9éme and was inspired by baseball, flowers, and getting money so as not to die. These are his simplest and most penetrating words."

KATE FOR AVEC JACK VERA INTL

Joseph Matick is an American poet and filmmaker based in Paris. He grew up on a farm in small-town America, moved to Chicago, and eventually to Paris, where he stayed. He studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University — of which he has said: “that place ripped the rug from under my feet” — and has been writing ever since. He is the author of four books: three published by Far West Press — The Baba Books (New American Babble, Post Meridiem Seasick Fuzz, Animal My Soul), Cherry Wagon, and Good Looking Pomes (March 31, 2026). His work appears in King Kong Magazine and is held in the collection of the American Library in Paris.

Translated to English for the first time. 

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, PACES THE CAGE, lifts off from their previous book, Wild Peach (2020), by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds and a musical language and tone used throughout the book helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative collection by this adventurous and endlessly exciting artist. As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking, and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators.

PACES THE CAGE extends S*an D. Henry-Smith’s interdisciplinary, improvisational listening into a poetics of “fissure and measure,” where silence and the sonic converge in boundless motion. Tuning language toward the frequencies of breath, pulse, and sociality, Henry-Smith's poems transport us from natural worlds to communal forms to Bill Gunn’s STOP, recovering wayward images and utterances to compose a surround sound of loss and renewal. What emerges is both reckoning and remedy—a lush sensitivity to the ways language becomes live, as in now, as in “eyes open, full of rage.”

–Maxe Crandall

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s reverberant propositions seek the music of mutual renewal, constantly and impatiently approaching the present. This is a field of spiraling, alliterative song, the wild signature of Henry-Smith’s lyric, that renews commitments to militancy by naming and knowing its enemies as doubtlessly as it names and knows it lovers. PACES THE CAGE considers a set of conditions—technical, material phenomena—that produce collective and contradictory imaginations and gives words to the song that makes the gathering last, “all in for all…” PACES THE CAGE is a beautiful rehearsal of attentiveness, a rigorous and generous correspondence with the edges of the frame.      

– dove, Christine Kirubi

S*an's PACES THE CAGE recalls to me Akilah Oliver’s 2004 An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. A lyrical unleashing into the many selves, the author here plays conduit for many beautiful bodies; for those souls wandering at daybreak; for the pudgy greased cheeks and those that murmur in the dew of twilight uncloaked. It is as if the poet has extracted from the marsh, the runoff, roundup and peat to stockpile and make lush a new yet familiar world. S*an has created a collection of diamonds from the salty mines of turtle tears. The divorced defanged possessive absent its apostrophe, left to the mud puddle for butterfly nuptials throughout, tells the reader: How you know me Now will be Different from how you knew me. These buoyant poems that are S*an’s latest songs have not missed the train this time. Make certain that you don’t. I’m in awe.

–LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs 

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing.