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Cover of Harmless Medicine

Manic D Press

Harmless Medicine

Justin Chin

€16.00

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.

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Cover of Dictee (Second Edition, Reissue, Restored)

University of California Press

Dictee (Second Edition, Reissue, Restored)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Poetry €19.00

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.

A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

Cover of Barking Up the Wrong Tree

How To Become

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Sophie T. Lvoff

Poetry €6.00

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

Cover of Ante body

Nightboat Books

Ante body

Marwa Helal

Poetry €16.50

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).

Cover of Eecchhooeess

DABA

Eecchhooeess

N.H. Pritchard

Poetry €24.00

American poet Norman H. Pritchard's second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard's writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard's formal and conceptual sensibilities, and provides an entryway into the work of a poet whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition. DABA's publication of EECCHHOOEESS is unabridged and closely reproduces the design of the original 1971 volume.  

Norman H. Pritchard (1939-96) was affiliated with the Umbra group, a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement. He taught writing at the New School for Social Research and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971). His work was anthologized in publications including The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies (1970), Ishmael Reed's 19 Necromancers from Now (1970), Text-Sound Texts (1980) and others.

Cover of Bonbons à l'anis

Brook

Bonbons à l'anis

Cecilia Pavón

Fiction €18.00

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.