Matters of Feminist Practice

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two places at once.

The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking.

Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing.

The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!

This expanded new edition of Carla Harryman's early-'00s classic, OPEN BOX, features a new introduction by Rachel Levitsky and new afterwords by erica kaufman and Carla Harryman. 

GRNN alert just in—Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman’s OPEN BOX. This dance of demi-characters—half half, semiquaver, three hooks quarter—places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain armed forces. Next up: removing oneself to another place; migration.
—Tina Darragh

Carla Harryman’s Open Box is a meditation-in-process on the possibility of a poetry available to cultural, social and political critique that does not unwittingly reinscribe the political, social and cultural formations (textual and otherwise) against which it is posed. Because Harryman wants to preserve a ‘place,’ if not ‘places,’ for an aesthetic and procedure resistant to reification, she deploys improvisation as writing, as textual practices open to the future and, more ambitiously, to the past, to the written.
—Tyrone Williams

Carla Harryman is an innovator in interdisciplinary performance, poetry, and prose. She has authored seventeen books including W— /M— (2013), Adorno’s Noise (2008), Gardener of Stars (2001), and the multi-authored work The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980. Her Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. She has received many grants and awards including from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America Next Stage, Fund for Poetry, and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.

Carla Harryman is also the author of The Wide Road, a collaborative book with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna*, 2011, reprinted 2026).

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.

The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power. 

This poetry collection views the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization. Drawing from sources such as Sigmund Freud, James George Frazer, H.D., the Situationist International, seventeenth century narratives of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the Korean peninsula, the rise of K-pop and the “Korean Wave,” and a zoo-breaking gorilla named Bokito, Festival features kaleidoscopic poetic sequences aiming to show that if anything universal is to be found in lyric poetry’s “I,” it is the result of centuries-long entanglements and contaminations, and of the bodies made to bear these exchanges, to give birth to this century’s globalized subject.

“FESTIVAL is an ode to both beauty and misery. Mia You’s ingenious poetry will have you laughing through your tears. Do NOT miss out!”
— Yael van der Wouden

"She reanimates the form-of-life which is a poem with a feminist skepticism, without foreclosing her robustly idealist commitment to poetry’s continuance"
— Lisa Robertson

The Book of Skies, like its predecessor Excess-The Factory, emerged from poet Leslie Kaplan's experience participating in the national strike and social revolution of ’68 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory, puts the factory experience strikingly on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the poem’s speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

From the beginning of her career, French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L'exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the book’s first translation into English, though it had been translated into five other languages.

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

Mangled diction from the cusp of childhood. 

Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt."

Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, and performance writer who has collaborated with multiple visual artists and composers on bodies of work. Her work has been translated into several languages, including French, with her writing represented in more than 30 national and international anthologies. She has received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), the Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), the Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among additional grants and awards from the Fund for Poetry.

Harryman was a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1979-1986). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Carla Harryman describes GARDENER OF STARS as "an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex - all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process.

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.

Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.

Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Haitian Chronicles is a graphic and brutal history of the Haitian Revolution told across three plays. It is the final work by the influential and groundbreaking playwright Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) and the first play of his to be published in several decades. Though much of his earlier work has been short one-act satires, The Haitian Chronicles takes place across three long plays: The Rise of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Fall of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the one-man drama, Dessalines.

The Haitian Chronicles is an example of Ward's political commitment to satirizing, dramatizing, and revealing the structures of white supremacy throughout the history of this so-called civilization. His first play, Star of Liberty, written at 19 years of age, was based the life of Nat Turner and the slave revolt he led. With The Haitian Chronicles, Ward returns to armed Black rebellion, taking as its subject matter the first and only slave revolt to successfully establish a free state. It is a self-consciously ambitious work of astounding narrative and theatrical scope, featuring over 80 speaking roles and logistically demanding production design. The narrative onslaught chronicling the disgusting brutality of colonial French society and the bloody force it took to overthrow it overwhelms the reader and challenges one to question the structures on which society is built and the violence it continues to perpetuate.

Ward was one of the central, driving forces of the Black Theater movement in the United States. After moving to New York in 1948, he became immersed in the radical political scene in Harlem, writing for The Daily Worker, and studying as an actor. He served as understudy to Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, and began a long friendship with fellow actor Robert Hooks. In 1966, Hooks helped produce Ward’s double bill Happy Ending / Day of Absence. Following the success of these plays, Ward was asked to write an editorial for the New York Times in 1966. His article, titled "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", surveyed the ubiquitous, stifling racism of the American theatre and was widely circulated, earning Ward further recognition for his political and theatrical work. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Ward and Hooks, together with Gerald Krone, founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967. Writing and directing for the NEC over the next several decades, Ward worked with icons such as Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, Leslie Lee, Errol Hill, Charles Fuller, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka. He directed dozens of plays throughout his career including Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, The River Niger and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play. Ward continued to write until his death in 2021– The Haitian Chronicles is the result of over four decades of work, a superb series of plays by an inimitable writer and artist.

Boo-Hooray proudly placed the Douglas Turner Ward Archive at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in 2017. The Archive includes many working drafts of the numerous plays Ward directed and wrote, manuscript materials, and correspondence with other icons of the Black Arts.

The Haitian Chronicles was a winner of the AIGA 50 Books & 50 Cover Award for the work of book designer Martha Ormiston.