Karen Brodine: Woman Sitting At The Machine, Thinking And Censorship

Tangents is an English-language online review platform focused on writing about the Dutch art scene-on what is happening both within the borders of the Netherlands and about Dutch-based artists presenting work beyond them. Born from a frustration with the prevalence of objectivity and imposing house styles in the majority of art writing commissioned by leading platforms, Tangents instead encourages contributors to approach criticism from within the specificities and focuses of their own writing practice. 

Tangents publishes a monthly review written by a writer from our stable of permanent contributors. This publication is the first printed compendium of recent writing, published on the occasion of Tangents' mentorship pro-gram, for which the founding editors each supported a young writer through development and to publication. The 2024/25 mentees were Mehmet Süzgün, Lou Vives and Dido W.

A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.

A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, "The Beautiful One," comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson's poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

Know Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries’ third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor – but not poetry altogether.

Speaking—or rather, singing—as a ‘battered woman’ from a working-class neighborhood, De Vries’ aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the author—and not her perpetrator—pulls the strings. Who is the victim in these poems? Can violence be redeemed through esthetic metamorphosis? Or can powerlessness only be transferred as fetish? Know Thy Audience investigates the extent to which a victim can share their wounds, and to what degree an audience can—sensibly, ethically—be burdened with painful knowledge.

Gerhard Rühm is a radical experimenter, a restless explorer of traditions and genres, atomizing their elements in order to recompose them with conceptual precision and a multiplicity of compositional techniques. He has worked with music and visual art, but basically the world is language for Rühm, the dictionary its body, and the alphabet its backbone.

Gerhard Rühm was born in Vienna in 1930. He began by studying composition and Oriental music, but came to devote most of his energy to literature, esp. concrete poetry. His aim has been nothing less than making language an aesthetic medium on a par with music and visual art.

Rühm is also known for his editions of Baroque and Expressionist poets. His prizes include the “Grosse Österreichische Staatspreis” (1991) and the “Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden” (1983). From 1972-95 he taught at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. He now lives in Cologne.

“Orgy, for R. means semantic excess and turbulence, the coitus of words outside their usual use.”—Mittelbayerische Zeitung

“The almost constructivist compositions derive their solidity from the musical use of rhyme, assonance , alliteration and rhythmic figures, and not least through song- and sonata elements.” — Klaus Peter Dencker, Nürnberger Nachrichten

Rosmarie Waldrop's most recent books of poetry are Blindsight (New Directions) and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). She has translated Edmond Jabès (her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2002), Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.