Desiderata

TIME by Spencer Longo is a collection of printed work depicting government raids, religious visions, environmental catastrophe, and extremist fundamentalism tangled together in a narrative web of salvation, annihilation, and transcendence. Using pen plotter graphics directly on uncollated pages of Time magazine, Longo explores the conspiratorial trope that messages are secretly embedded in mass media, coaxing our millenarian anxieties out through an additive printing process using graphics from survivalist publications, end-times evangelical cartoons, and marginalia from the borders of underground occult material, all sprinkled with ecstatic bursts of star-spangled clipart. A must-have for your fallout shelter's library.

The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic. —Juliana Huxtable

Translated by Kit Schluter
Afterword and notes by Thibaud Croisy, translated by Olivia Baes

Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.

The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy. —Robert Glück

The Queens’ Ball is probably Copi’s masterpiece... By 1978, Copi was already an aesthetic: The Queens’ Ball was the magnet, the inverted whirlpool that brought that aesthetic to the surface. —César Aira

Cactus erotica. Dykes taking T erotica. Handmade rope erotica. 
Tangentially alien erotica. Clit long like laffy taffy erotica. Death erotica.

In L.A. Warman's anti-sequel to her award-winning debut Whore Foods, two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which recieved a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. She is a founding organizer of the Free Ashley Now survivor defense campaign.

"This book is an instant waypoint on my return to the revelation: if nothing else, my tears have a place where they belong—mixed into the dust of others." — Wilmer Wilson IV

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

Name, the third novel in Constance Debré’s acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.

Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Debré’s first two novels embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. Using the facts of her own life as impersonal “material” for literature, Playboy and Love Me Tender epitomized what Debré (after Thomas Bernhard) has called “antiautobiography.” They introduced French and American readers to her fiercely spare prose, distilled from influences as disparate as Saint Augustine, Albert Camus, and Guillaume Dustan. “Minimalist and at times even desolate,” wrote the New York Review of Books, these works defied “the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.”

Name is Debré’s most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator’s  childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past.  Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to  get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I’m not holding on to the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project.

Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including "Poem About My Rights," "Poem About Police Violence," "Free Flight," and an essay by the poet, "For the Sake of the People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us."

June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.

The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member.

Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts.

With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.