Neighbor

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate.

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.

“The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.” —Kim So Yeon

Yoo Heekyung (b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press).

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

God Is a Bitch Too is the accelerated and acidic English-language debut of Colombian poet María Paz Guerrero­. In this chapbook, god is needy, Latin American, and an overweight woman. No one asks god to dance. Someone speaks, someone tries: “One is the measure of their body.”

God Is a Bitch Too is #13 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.

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).