Blade Pitch Control Unit

A debut collection from the poet, artist and designer, a suite of unfaithful translations/transversions of works drawn from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, a bunch of flowers in decay, pressed and frayed, ‘a flock of pockmarked words.’

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue. — Mia You

Alix Chauvet is a Swiss-French poet and graphic designer based in Amsterdam, taking pleasure in the possibilities of translation. She received her BA in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, 2020), and has since been working independently and in collaboration with contemporary artists. Investigating the relationships between language and body, intimacy and collectivity, past and contemporary, her hybrid practice covers a wide range of visual and linguistic experiments from artist’s book design to experimental translation. Her method is rooted in decelerating the creative process through the use of analogue and unprofitable techniques such as cut-outs, letterpress, linocut, handwriting and painting. Chauvet’s poetic approach follows the same logic, prioritising English over her mother tongue as a way to revise language with both critical detachment and a degree of identification. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Blackbox Manifold, and Cyclamen is her debut collection.

of sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear. 

While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.

"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible. Originally published as a series of home-made pamphlets that seemed to come as much from post-punk zine culture as from avant-garde poetics, it's good to see them gathered here in one place for the first time and as a body of evidence of a culture of struggle. These poems do not merely comment on that struggle, but emerge from within it. They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity." – Sean Bonney

Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Don’t say “Rest in Peace,” say Fuck the Police: A Sean Bonney Tribute Portfolio, featuring: Katharina Ludwig, Lama El Khatib & Haytham El Wardany, Anahid Nersessian, Vicky Sparrow, Koshka Duff, Max Henninger, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, D.S. Marriott, Fran Lock, Joey Frances, Mathilda Cullen, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Eve Richens, Sacha Kahir, Uwe Möllhusen & Marie Schubenz, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Linda Kemp, Daniel Eltringham & Fred Carter, Hugo García Manríquez, Jèssica Pujol Duran & Macarena Urzúa Opazo. With additional work by Belén Roca, translated by Noah Mazer, Adelaide Ivánova, translated by Chris Daniels, stevie redwood, Cait O’Kane, Mau Baiocco, Peter Bouscheljong, translated by Jonathan Styles. Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Zhou Xiaojing, Mayamor, translated by Eric Abalajon, Afrizal Malna, translated by Daniel Owen, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, translated by Shook, James Goodwin, Amalia Tenuta. Plus Engagements: Anne Boyer interviewed by Eduardo Rabassa, Gail Scott interviewed by Michael Nardone, Noah Ross on David Melnick, Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pedro Pietri, Coco Fitterman on Ennio Moltedo, Sam Moore on Aaron Shurin, David Grundy on Lorenzo Thomas

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

HONEY is a zine meditating on the experiences of friendship. 

Volume 2 was edited by Mars Dietz, Opashona Ghosh and Dylan Spencer-Davidson—each inviting contributions from friends. 

Following vol. 1’s optimism about the underappreciated potentials of friendship, vol. 2 marks a noticeable turn towards friendship's messier sides. Letters to deceased friends, childhood social complexities, unrealised sexual desire, pushback against the overfetishisation of queer kinship, and more. 

Contributions from Azul De Monte, Ana Božičević, D Mortimer, Adriana Disman, Pelumi Adejumo, Iggy Robinson, Clay AD, To Doan, Edward Herring, marum, Lou Drago, Aisha Mirza, Iga Świeściak, Roya Amirsoleymani, George Lynch, Emily Pope and Kari Rosenfeld. 

Original artworks by Opashona Ghosh and Iga Świeściak, and featuring artworks by Azul De Monte and Emily Pope. 

Riso printed on recycled paper with Pagemasters (London).

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.