Books

Resistance dispatch 002

In 2024, the documentary No Other Land, co-produced by Palestinian and Jewish activists from Masafer Yatta drew internattional attention at film festivals, bringing the long-standing occupation, demolitions, and violence in the region into broader public view.

The starting point of this publication emerged from an impromptu decision to draw a family tree covering roughly five hundred villagers of Umm al-Kheir. The author follows two threads simultaneously: one traces verifiable institutional and geographic transformations, tracking how a community is systematically rendered illegal through planning regimes and court rulings; the other comes from lived encounters, oral testimony, and the moments when people entrusted me with their names, their kinship ties, and their past.

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

Born in Beirut, Ali Cherri lives and works between Beirut and Paris. He belongs to this generation of Lebanese artists born during the civil war whose work has been strongly affected by this context of instability.

Through an introduction by the artist, 4 essays and an interview, this first monograph reveals the political, aesthetic and dreamlike dimensions of a work that the artist has been developing for over fifteen years. Ali Cherri's interdisciplinary work explores the myths and classifications of ancient worlds and contemporary societies

My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.

“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?”— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

How can we define and document our present? 

Postmortem is a sensitive yet critical metaphor for a world suspended between collapse and reinvention—a diary of the now. Drawing together writers and artists from Europe and the SWANA region, this issue locates areas of tension that define our era. Far from a mere dialogue between regions, it exposes the inner and outer fractures of Western hegemony, unearthing shared emotions. 

From reclaiming histories and narratives in the Arab world to deconstructing digital spaces as arenas of control and resistance—even exposing systemic exclusions embedded in blood donation policies—contributors reveal these tensions as a fertile terrain for dialogue and reflection. 

Through critical essays, narrative writing, poetry, interviews, and contemporary art, the concept of Postmortem unfolds an in-between state where death and rebirth occur simultaneously. Across three interwoven chapters—Metaconnexion, Dissociation, and Fragmentation—the issue engages radically with body politics, othering, post-orientalism, surveillance, decoloniality, freedom, and resistance. 

Both a chronicle and a hybrid object where text, design, and image interact, Postmortem archives a world in flux. Rather than prognosticate, it dissects the present as the essential site for reimagining our future. 

Contributors : Sara El-Jazara, François Peyroux, Nadine Makarem, Soukaina Melhaoui, Louise Mervelet, Manon Schaefle, Marina Mardas, Irina Breitenstein, Amer Al-Dakar

The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.

"Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life."— Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple

New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.

Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.

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.

The Chroma Series lists elements of reality and systematically changes their color to evoke monochrome universes. The resulting poems may be conceived as mental films where quick-change art coexists with nonsense and politics.

A slippery novel set in the Bay Area of the early aughts, where femininity, race, and class tangle together.

Neotenica is a novel of encounters: casual sex, arranged-marriage dates, cops, rowdy teenagers, lawyers, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs. At the center of it are Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned PhD student, and her husband, a Korean-American male who inhabits an interior femininity, neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. This novel is an adrenaline-filled ride sliding across the surface of desire and chance through the quotidian turned playful.

For this collection of poems and prose, Leslie Scalapino has gathered four sequences into what she calls an “aeolotropic series.” The poems reflect each other like crystals and change like highly polished glass illuminated by a shifting light. They follow the mind from thought and observation to afterthought, reflection, and obsession.

Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, and essays, including numerous collaborations with artists, writers, and dancers. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff: German Theater 2010–2022 is the first monograph on the work of the artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, Minneapolis, MN) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, Buffalo, NY). Their manifold practices play out, live test, and fictionalize the mechanisms that shape creative communities. Chronicling over a decade of production in Berlin, the book is organized around the influential bar and theater spaces they ran there: Times Bar (2011–12), New Theater (2013–15), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18), and TV Bar (2019–22), and includes an interview with curator Fabrice Stroun and essays by David Bussel and Patrick Armstrong. Henkel and Pitegoff's photographs, plays, writing, and films address the complexity of collective action, painting a deadpan picture of the social and economic systems that sustain communal exchanges and their eminently fragile autonomy.

Edited by Fabrice Stroun
Design by Dan Solbach

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

Paradisiaca. Un Lac-Opéra est un livre sur la région du Lac de Constance (Bodensee), troisième Lac d’Europe situé à la frontière de l’Allemagne, l’Autriche et la Suisse. Écrit sur une période de cinq ans avec de multiples séjours sur place, le livre propose une exploration du Lac qui est un haut-lieu d’eau et de lumière, de culture et d’art. C’est un livre de la résistance écrit contre la morosité ambiante. Cette résistance ne s’exprime pas à travers un discours activiste ou un discours-contre, mais à travers la conviction à la fois écologique, philosophique et poétique que notre vie future, si elle veut être harmonieuse, doit renouer avec les lois de la terre, de l’eau et de l’air. Le récit est porté par de multiples voix qui font vivre la région du Lac dans sa spécificité et sa multiplicité. Le texte est un hybride à la fois journal, récit de voyage, récit d’un amour pour la terre et un homme mais aussi théâtre de marionnettes décliné sous forme de poèmes qui sont autant de chants.

Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition.

This uniquely-positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能.

Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a toolbox for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.

Moving beyond the clichés that still dominate the contemporary debate, this interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become.

Contributors: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, An Bo, Benjamin Bratton, Chen Qiufan, Gabriele de Seta, Shuang L. Frost, Vincent Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Bogna Konior, Vincent Lê, Lawrence Lek, Lukáš Likavčan, Suzanne Livingston, Iris Long, Bingchun Meng, Reza Negarestani, Wang Hongzhe, Regina Kanyu Wang, Xin Wang, Xia Jia, You Mi.

A Mouth Holds Many Things collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media.

At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? Lifting language beyond the domain of the letter, the works collected here present language in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile. Language, after all, is multi-textu(r)al, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities.

A project of the Portland-based literary-social art project, De-Canon, which creates unique spaces and experiments to center works by writers of color, this collection is edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.

A Mouth Holds Many Things was, in the short stories/poetry/anthologies category, the winner of a 2024 PubWest Book Design Award.

Full list of contributors

Stephanie Adams-Santos, Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Aya Bram, Victoria Chang, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Monica Ong, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Alley Pezanoski-Browne, Kelly Puig, Ayesha Raees, Jhani Randhawa, Paisley Rekdal, Daisuke Shen, Sasha Stiles, Sandy Tanaka, Arianne True, Addie Tsai, Vauhini Vara, Divya Victor, Anna Martine Whitehead, Kathy Wu

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

SERIES III is a collection of 8 chapbooks that authenticate Edward Dahlberg's claim that "There is more political energy in friendship than in ideology."

Langston Hughes & Nancy Cunard cement their personal relationship by penning notes across the ocean throughout the Spanish Civil War. After meeting at Black Mountain, John Wieners & Charles Olson remain in close correspondence until months before Olson's death. In "Old Father, Old Artificer," part lecture and part evocation of Charles Olson, Diane di Prima helps to establish how key figures in "New American Poetry" were processing their own past, while the breathless Olson lecture by Ed Dorn erodes the fictive dualism that pits poetic theory against practical action. In his letters, Michael Rumaker invites you to share his life, its radiant pursuit of love, "dirty realism," literature, and lasting community, and Joanne Kyger booms "communication is essential" in her Letters to & from. In Homemade Poems, a gift-book mailed to a friend in 1964, Lorine Niedecker insists that the handmade chapbook is the material continuation of the poems so carefully nestled in its pages.

Breaking up the monolith of the historical lens, Series III continues to track individuals as they tell their stories, cast their lifelines, and position themselves in relation to the times they lived in—and the times we live in—through intimate journals, letters, lectures, and friendships. Edited, annotated, and with accompanying essays, The London Review of Books calls this "a serious and worthy enterprise." Diane di Prima calls the series "a gold mine" and Joanne Kyger writes: "What a brilliant cast of characters. Just exactly what one (myself) would like to read."

SERIES III includes:

Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor)

John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (Michael Seth Stewart, editor)

Diane di Prima: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Božičević, editors)

Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor)

Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (Megan Paslawski, editor)

Letters to & from Joanne Kyger (Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, editors)

Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Anne Donlon, editor)

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.

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

First edition of the Engagement Arts Zine.

Published May 2019

Another Room to Live In is an archive of encounter: a multilingual conversation between fifteen poet-translators, connected through friendship, correspondence, and cross-diasporic gatherings. With work in English, Arabic, and French, the collection moves beyond both language and nation-state, investing instead in transcontinental dreamspaces. Here, translation practices collaboratively transform the poems and reflect the poets’ own experiences of “living” in multiple languages. Complicating any flat conception of identity, the poems presented here seek to revisit and challenge foundational narratives, to rework mythologies, and to do all this through a cross-generational process of translation as poetic communion.

Contributors include: Etel Adnan, Hoda Adra, Sinan Antoon, Mirene Arsanios, Omar Berrada, Sara Elkamel, Safaa Fathy, Soukaina Habiballah, Marilyn Hacker, Golan Haji, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Pierre Joris, Mona Kareem, Souad Labbize, Rachida Madani, Alisha Mascarenhas, Iman Mersal, Aya Nabih, Sarah Riggs, Yasmine Seale, Cole Swensen, Habib Tengour, and Sam Wilder.

A bold, revelatory argument for the power of language by leading radical lesbian feminist and author of The Straight Mind. 

The Literary Workshop takes readers inside Monique Wittig’s creative process, unlocking the practice of writing both in material and political terms. Wittig provides her most com­plete account of how literature and politics work together. Part of the generation that revolutionized French literature, Wittig reveals the secret of her craft: that the work a writer does with language is itself a form of resistance. 

Born and raised in France, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was a driving force in second-wave feminism and one of the most brilliant authors of her generation. A provocative thinker, she famously declared that lesbians are not women and in­troduced women into a materialist framework by treating them as a class. Wittig is the author of, among other titles, The Straight Mind, Les Guérillères, and The Lesbian Body. Her debut novel, The Opoponax, won Le Prix Medicis. 

A landmark collection of poems by Bambi Lake, the beloved (and bad-mouthed) icon of San Francisco’s counterculture.

Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse, performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ’70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she sang in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including being on the fringes of the Cockettes, and a member of the adjacent Angels of Light—was “sort of legendary,” sort of “sweet, sticky, nasty,” and always precarious, lived in spite of addiction, homelessness, and the horrors that came from chasing and surviving her own desires.

Here are her poems, long out of print, that wear “burgundy velvet jezebel bras” to seduce “fatally hetero” men, detailing the cabaret of desire amidst social, cultural, and political change. “I am Beauty,” she writes, “and the world dissolves.”

The collection includes a series of interviews by August Bernadicou and a foreword by Brontez Purnell.