Charismatic Spirals

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers; literature the wink that slips into a wince.

Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous "legs" of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the "foot" of a bed. Quintilian's "thirsty" crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes' compassed "wings" of a house. Augustine's "piscina" in which no fish are to be found (and only humans drown). With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.

Featuring Will Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, César Dávila Andrade, Martine Bellen, Stanislav Belsky, Anselm Berrigan, David Buuck, Garrett Caples, Sam Cha, Logan Fry, Lawrence Giffin, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, E. Tracy Grinnell, Karen Holman, Elise Houcek, Andrew Joron, Inna Krasnoper, Carlos Lara, Jonathan Larson, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Michael Leong, Douglas A. Martin, olga mikolaivna, Sheila E. Murphy, Ann Pedone, Sal Randolph, Martha Ronk, Jonathan Simkins, Christophe Tarkos, Edwin Torres, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Wendy Xu & John Yau

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s coming-of-age tale about finding a community among fellow outcasts.

Born in the small Argentine town of Mina Clavero, Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that she’s different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out—with swift consequences. Deeply intelligent, she eventually leaves for the city to attend university, slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park, in the heart of Córdoba, she discovers the strange, wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.

Taken under the wing of Auntie Encarna, the 178-year-old eternal whose house shelters this unconventional extended family, Camila becomes a part of their stories—of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars, a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye.

Camila Sosa Villada’s extraordinary first novel is a rich, nuanced portrait of a marginalized community: their romantic relationships, friendships and squabbles, difficulties at work, aspirations and disappointments. It bears witness to these lives constantly haunted by the specter of death—by disease or more violent means at the hands of customers, boyfriends, or the police—yet full of passion, empathy, and insight.

The English-language debut of a beautiful and beguiling cycle of experimental texts by the legendary Marguerite Duras. 

In the late 1970s, Marguerite Duras embarked on an experimental journey to expand the boundaries of writing and film. For Duras, writing need not be text on a page nor cinema merely images on a screen. Six Films is the result of her efforts to redefine the two arts in order to create a hybrid work. Taking narration, voiceovers, and dialogue from six of her films, Duras re-envisions them as extended prose poems and monologues, tangling with self-identity, personal relationships, colonialism, and expression as the celluoid images recede and the text becomes the film itself. Now available for the first time in English, Six Films is a document of an artist at the apex of her creative prowess.

Translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan. 

The narrator of Information Age is a journalist at an online news site reporting on technology, the economy, and politics in the late 2010s. The rate of increasingly short news cycles shapes her working life and her personal life, as she assumes the role of reporter while talking with engineers, analysts, wonks, artists, writers, musicians, friends, family, and lovers. Told in vignettes and dialogue—overheard and divulged—Information Age is spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.

Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.