Manimal Woe

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily van der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century—she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.

Whether discussing Simone Weil, Gertrude Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.

Contributors: Adam Dickinson, Andrea Éva Győri, A.L. Steiner, Alexandra Ivanciu, Barak Zemer, Bernhard Willhelm, Clara Lena Langenbach, Clémentine Bedos, Constance DeJong, Daisy Hildyard, Fanny Howe, Hanne Loreck, Hasti, Holly Hunter, Ingrid Jäger, Jannis Marwitz, Jess Arndt, Johannes Kuczera, Jolanta Nowaczyk, Henriette Maier, Mag Gabbert, Maja Smrekar, Manuel Vason, R.I.P. Germain, Rebekka Endler, Sonja Yakovleva 

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

With figures X, Y, and Z, Fanny Howe constructs "a repressed but emotional history" of encounters and unions between races, classes, genders, and epochs. Considering race as "the most random quality assigned to a soul," Howe has undertaken an (American) history of a racially mixed population. The work bears evidence to many creative unions as well: with Ben Watkins, who provided the photographs; with graphic artist Maceo Senna, who illustrated the text; with Nya Patrinos, set designer, video artist, and director of the original production; as well as with composers Miles Anderson and Erica Sharp, whose score adds another voice to the spoken three. The book includes a link to an audio recording of the work, originally performed at the Porter Troupe gallery in San Diego, 1997, with Paul Miles (X), Stephanie French (Y), and Andre Canty (Z). "So whiteness is what is dependent on a witness. / The moon's opaque and egg-like sheen is the kind of zero / that wants to be more than air and negativity."

A sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Known for his political engagement and deep humanism, and his pivotal role in Persian poetry’s modernist turn toward free verse, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) crafted poems that carried both lyrical intimacy and cultural force. A central, defiant voice in Iran’s modern literary history, Shamlou championed the power of poetry as an instrument of liberation. His work, long suppressed in his homeland, remains urgent for readers everywhere confronting censorship, exile, and erasure. This bilingual edition honors Shamlou’s centennial with the most expansive selection of his poetry to date in English, encompassing his wide thematic range: from fierce protest to intimate love, mythic storytelling to existential reflection. Niloufar Talebi’s vibrant translations and deeply researched commentary shine new light on Shamlou’s legacy and his relevance today.

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume? 

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

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.

The Poeticians is a publication of the performance of the collection of clothes and poetry called Writing Wounds To Heal by Swedish choreographer Pontus Pettersson. Made in velvet silk with the poetry burned out in the fabric exposing the texts, the poetry exposes both itself and the skin of the performer. Throughout the durational piece the performers are doing Pontus Petterssons cat practice and is one of the main ingredients of the project as well as the clothes/poems. The Poeticans is also a choreo-curational event that hosts different choreographic proposals inside of it. It is seen as module or installation where pieces, objects, performers can be inserted rather than a performance that executes and performs the same over and over. It was created as an extension of Pontus interest in poetry and choreography where hospitality and proximity is seen as key concepts in the development and execution of the event.

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.