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Cover of Nioque of the Early-Spring

The Song Cave

Nioque of the Early-Spring

Francis Ponge

€18.00

Translated from the French by Jonathan Larson.

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, The Song Cave presents the first English translation of Francis Ponge's NIOQUE OF THE EARLY-SPRING. Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its first publication in Paris, May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.  

April is not always the cruelest month. In these stray notations dated early April 1950, Ponge provides a latter-day version of Stravinsky's 'Sacre du printemps' or of William Carlos Williams' 'Spring and All', a vernal enactment of all the resurrectional energies of a spring-time-to-come, as witnessed firsthand at the farmhouse of 'La Fleurie' in southern France. When subsequently published in Tel Que in May 1968, eighteen years later, Ponge's rural, pastoral text now acquired a specific urban history and Utopianism, its Lucretian 'Nioque, ' or gnosis, now speaking to the gnomic revolutionary slogans of the Left Bank barricades: 'Be realistic, demand the impossible, ' 'Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.' Jonathan Larson's careful engagement with Ponge manages to seize what is most prosaic about his poetry—its fierce communism of the ordinary, its insistence that taking the part of things means taking words at their most etymological everydayness. - Richard Sieburth  

This startlingly fresh and necessary document of the 1950s by Francis Ponge comes to us via the all too rare feat of true poetic reenactment. Understanding that each poet creates language anew, Jonathan Larson has found a poetics suitable for the occasion of Ponge's own poetic logic In this rendering, Larson's absolute care and attention to syllabic weight and measure, to the syntax and length of each line as it unwinds, allows us—as readers—to come into the drama of a text newly made, in other words, to discover a new poem in its very making. Yet, none of this comes at the cost of accuracy or through the subjugation of the original at the hands of one wielding the imperial language This is no mean feat in this day and age and, by way of Larson's exquisite ear, we are again given the poignancy and urgency of Ponge's own moment. - Ammiel Alcalay

Language: English

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Cover of Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018

The Song Cave

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018

Alice Notley

Poetry €27.00

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

Cover of Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Avarie Publishing

Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Giuliana Prucca

Essays €38.00

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Cover of If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again)

Fonograf Editions

If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again)

Jaime Gil de Biedma, James Nolan

Poetry €19.00

Jaime Gil de Biedma is the most original and influential among the poets known as the ‘50’s Generation in Spain, and is considered the greatest Spanish poet to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. His life and literary career were bracketed almost entirely by the rise and fall of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, notorious for the suppression of literature. Born in 1929, Gil de Biedma was six years old when García Lorca was murdered in Granada at the outbreak of the Civil War, and his collected poems, Las personas del verbo, first appeared in 1975, the year Franco died. What is surprising is that Gil de Biedma was a leftist, homosexual poet from the Catalan capitol, Barcelona – all of Franco’s favorite things – who not only published books of autobiographical poetry in Spain but was known as a poet of social conscience as well as erotic lyricism. Like other Spanish poets of his time, he chose his words carefully. Gil de Biedma died of AIDS in 1990.

If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) consists of an extensive bilingual selection of Gil de Biedma’s poetry, including all of his most well-known work. The book additionally consists of a Foreword by Spencer Reece, Jaime Gil de Biedma’s short essay “I wanted to be the poem,” and two different essays on Gil de Biedma and the art of translation by James Nolan, the volume’s translator.

Cover of Staircase Mystery (LP)

Speckled Toshe

Staircase Mystery (LP)

Karl Holmqvist

An oral performance (concept, texts and voice by Karl Holmqvist). 

Newspaper articles, snippets of conversation and pop lyrics form a textual mesh and merge into a variety of forms in dealing with text and its decoding and recoding. The text sometimes allows the quoted sources to stand out clearly and at other moments concentrates on the original qualities of the language.

Karl Holmqvist reads his poems in his distinctive lilting monotone way. He unterstands reading poetry as a form of visual art: as a form of invisible visual art, or as a form of Everyman's visual art. He is interested in poetry as a vehicle for communicating with and between people.

Recorded at Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève and in Karl Holmqvist's studio in Berlin.

Karl Holmqvist (born 1960 in Västerås, lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm) is a Swedish artist and poet whose work explores language as a sculptural and performative medium. Known for his text-based pieces, readings, and installations, he reconfigures language into rhythmic, often hypnotic compositions that unfold across performance, print, video, and object-based formats. Drawing on pop culture, protest, and poetry, Holmqvist transforms everyday language into visual and sonic material—blurring the boundaries between reading, speaking, and listening. His distinctive voice and approach invite audiences to encounter language not just as communication, but as energy, structure, and presence.

Cover of 5 Prison songs / 5 Hapishane Şarkısı

Istasyon

5 Prison songs / 5 Hapishane Şarkısı

Sabahattin Ali

Poetry €5.50

This booklet is a collection of 5 Prison Songs written by Sabahattin Ali in 1932-1933 whilst imprisoned in Konya and Sinop, Turkey. 

Bu kitapçık Sabahattin Ali’nin 1932-1933 senelerinde önce Konya sonra Sinop hapishanesinde kaleme aldığı 5 Hapishane Şarkısı içerir.

Cover of What do you worship?

Pendulum

What do you worship?

Beth Casserly

Poetry €11.00

What do you worship? What claims your time, your faith, your silence? What are the icons you carry, the relics you protect, the devotions that define you?

For our inaugural issue, we invite you to reflect on the objects, ideas, rituals, and obsessions that shape your devotion. Worship is not confined to temples or texts, it flickers in longing glances, whispered prayers, silent routines, and fervent beliefs. It can be sacred or profane, communal or solitary, chosen or inherited.

We encouraged our writers and artists to interpret this theme freely, critically, emotionally, playfully, or abstractly. Whether they explored worship through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, or hybrid forms, we were looking for work that comforts, commands, or consumes.

This issue features art and writing from: Triinu Silla, Michel Krysiak, Anna Tracey, Antonina Anna Kubicka, Ari Wentz, Jonathan David Sijl, Renacuajo Sánchez, Florence Hutchinson, Marta Calero Segura, Eden Ridout, Artémis Toumi, Simone Viola, Zoe Pappouti, Laura Soto Sánchez, Autumn Anderson, Woodkern, Cathal McGuire, Nena Pawletko, Ignacio Aguilera, Marine Victoria Lobos Garay, Andreea Luță, Isabel Ferreras González, Rafael Torrubia, Emilia Tapia, KC Willis, Simon Jin, Jacky Weerman, Róisín Gallagher, and Rin Anishchanka. 

Cover of Saint is its/Conviction

Self-Published

Saint is its/Conviction

SM

13 poems of various length.

"I have used a procedure to write them and I am happy to share it, but it isn't what's most important about these poems. The subject matter that, I eventually realised, they share to the extent of justifying bundling them up in one pamphlet is religiosity, what stands between belief and act, be it faith or trust."