Books

From the 1970s until her death, Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator and art worker. Alongside her individual creative endeavors, she nurtured and was a part of numerous influential artist communities and organizations in New York, Louisiana and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, the restaurant Food, the Kitchen, P.S. 1 and the Festival International de la Louisiane. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work,” blurred the boundaries between artmaking and what she called life-making. Sign-In is the first comprehensive monograph on her interdisciplinary oeuvre. It gathers documentation of her work in video, performance, drawing, textile, wall works and installation, tracing Girouard’s practice and legacy across genres and geographies.

Edited by Andrea Andersson with Jordan Amirkhani
With new essays by Andrea Andersson, Jordan Amirkhani, Anaïs Duplan, Pamela M. Lee, Aruna D’Souza, and Lumi Tan

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.

Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing  from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love,  to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall. 

A dark-humored poet’s novel of cruising, contempt, and database crawling, Stalled Death Train rumbles through the death of David Bowie in 2016 to shake apart its narrator’s sense of self. Nick, a burned out office worker and late-Bowie fanatic, spends his days mourning his fallen star, left to decipher the legacy and lyrics of a singular pop icon whose excesses did not cease, even after his greatest moments had passed. Meanwhile, Nick must solve the mystery of why his boyfriend has begun to self-amputate as a form of autonomously upgrading his dimensions—or at least call tech support before he uploads himself to the cloud.

Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners. 

Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.

As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."

Contributors include: Raven Chacon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lou Cornum, Grace Dillon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miguel Hilari, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Pedro Neves Marques, Fox Maxy, Michael Metzger, Jas M. Morgan, Caroline Monnet, Shelley Niro, Adam Piron, Tiare Ribeaux, Diana Flores Ruíz, Walter Scott, Girish Shambu, Paul Chaat Smith, Adam Spry, Elizabeth Weatherford.

This book was published in conjunction with COUSIN Collective.

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie’s work, pornography, and special effects. The title refers to the way the artist moves through different periods and aesthetic spaces, appropriating their codes in order to construct new visual fictions. The book is infused with post-#MeToo feminist thinking, alternative uses of biography, reflections on the art world, and contemporary debates surrounding appropriation, embodiment, and the status of the artwork.

McKenzie and Canet worked with each other for over eight years, on projects like Atelier E.B: Passer-by catalogue, published on the occasion of the Fondation Galeries Lafayette exhibition, or the book Pervert or Detective, a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and artist Reba Maybury. This collaboration now culminated in an exhibition and a book: Plastic Newspaper (presented at CRAC Sète in March 2026) and Lucy McKenzie, The Tenant.

Texts by Marie Canet and Lucy McKenzie
Translations: Catherine Petit & Paul Buck (Marie Canet), Juliette Desorgues (Lucy McKenzie)

Published in connection with the exhibition Lucy McKenzie, Plastic Newspaper, at Crac Occitanie, Centre régional d‘art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée à Sète, 21.03.-06.09.26

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, PACES THE CAGE, lifts off from their previous book, Wild Peach (2020), by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds and a musical language and tone used throughout the book helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative collection by this adventurous and endlessly exciting artist. As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking, and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators.

PACES THE CAGE extends S*an D. Henry-Smith’s interdisciplinary, improvisational listening into a poetics of “fissure and measure,” where silence and the sonic converge in boundless motion. Tuning language toward the frequencies of breath, pulse, and sociality, Henry-Smith's poems transport us from natural worlds to communal forms to Bill Gunn’s STOP, recovering wayward images and utterances to compose a surround sound of loss and renewal. What emerges is both reckoning and remedy—a lush sensitivity to the ways language becomes live, as in now, as in “eyes open, full of rage.”

–Maxe Crandall

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s reverberant propositions seek the music of mutual renewal, constantly and impatiently approaching the present. This is a field of spiraling, alliterative song, the wild signature of Henry-Smith’s lyric, that renews commitments to militancy by naming and knowing its enemies as doubtlessly as it names and knows it lovers. PACES THE CAGE considers a set of conditions—technical, material phenomena—that produce collective and contradictory imaginations and gives words to the song that makes the gathering last, “all in for all…” PACES THE CAGE is a beautiful rehearsal of attentiveness, a rigorous and generous correspondence with the edges of the frame.      

– dove, Christine Kirubi

S*an's PACES THE CAGE recalls to me Akilah Oliver’s 2004 An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. A lyrical unleashing into the many selves, the author here plays conduit for many beautiful bodies; for those souls wandering at daybreak; for the pudgy greased cheeks and those that murmur in the dew of twilight uncloaked. It is as if the poet has extracted from the marsh, the runoff, roundup and peat to stockpile and make lush a new yet familiar world. S*an has created a collection of diamonds from the salty mines of turtle tears. The divorced defanged possessive absent its apostrophe, left to the mud puddle for butterfly nuptials throughout, tells the reader: How you know me Now will be Different from how you knew me. These buoyant poems that are S*an’s latest songs have not missed the train this time. Make certain that you don’t. I’m in awe.

–LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs 

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing.

Monument Zero emerges from International Women’s Day on 8 March 1979 in Iran. The archival materials that form the starting point depict six days of protests, sit-ins, and conferences that began on this day in Tehran. These historical objects have been preserved by the mercy of their creators, who were present during the 1979 protests, and are scattered across personal and public holdings worldwide. By bringing together the materials that depict this forgotten history, Monument Zero counters historical erasure and explores the preservation of political struggles through collective artistic practice.

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

On the occasion of Tony Cokes' solo-exhibition, ARGOS produced a unique purple t-shirt with silver lettering. 100% cotton; 180 grams. Silkscreen by Bootlegz in Brussels.

Available in XL (XS, S, M and L are sold out)
Edition of 100

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

An essential collection of essays on language, the imagination, and the art of words by one of the great literary masters of the last century. 

This book traces a long sweep (1973-2014) through Ursula K. Le Guin's career; offering both a portrait of the author as a philosopher and a reference text for new generations of wordworkers and bookmakers.

Contributions by Jerry Ahn, Han Ok-hee, Han Soon-ae, Lilian Gonzalez, Kim Jeon-seon, Miss Lee, Lee Jeong-hee, Hansen Oh, Yun Park, Seonha Park, Sun Hyejeong, Wang Gyu-won.

Bulletin B is a bilingual editorial project gathering artistic and cultural productions from Korea and its diasporas, with a focus on queer and womxn voices. Borrowing the spirit of an unofficial newsletter, it surfaces when it needs to; assembling poetry, prose, and cultural fragments across time. 

Rooted in translation as a practice attentive to power, history, and silenced voices, Bulletin B reconstructs fragmented lineages and constellations of reference through irregular acts of dissemination and exchange, tracing how narratives move between languages, contexts, and material forms.

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.

Greer Lankton’s iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes. 

Magic Hour Press is proud to present the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton’s dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book’s 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton’s own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself. 

Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong, and Lankton’s close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as “one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny.” 

Edited by Francis Schichtel, Jordan Weitzman and Nan Goldin
Text by Hilton Als

Laminaire est un livre de poésie sur la représentation, c’est-à-dire sur les manières contemporaines de montrer et de percevoir. Le pouvoir, qu’il émane de l’Etat ou bien des grandes entreprises de la Tech, se diffuse sur internet sous la forme de contenus préformatés, et ce dans un environnement médiatique où la production d’images (et notamment de mèmes) est presque infinie. C’est à partir de ce constat que la poétique d’Elsa Boyer, avec beaucoup de virtuosité et d’humour, se déploie. Par leur richesse lexicale, leur capacité à rapprocher des éléments pourtant hétéroclites et le baroque de certaines images, ces poèmes offrent au lectorat un horizon critique renouvelé. 

Laminaire est composé de dix-sept longs poèmes dans lesquels sont tressés vers et fragments de prose. On y rencontre, entre autres choses, un sénateur américain, des contrats de propriété et de location, les dessins de corps féminins et d’organes dans les traités d’anatomie, les vidéos Tiktok d’un président, la vidéo de présentation du robot Optimus de Tesla par Elon Musk, le texte du Schéma national du maintien de l’ordre, ou encore des projets et propositions de loi. 

Elsa Boyer est l’autrice d’une oeuvre littéraire remarquable. Elle a publié, aux éditions P.O.L et aux éditions MF, des récits, des essais, des traductions salués par la critique autant pour leurs inventions formelles que pour la pertinence de leurs sujets. Laminaire est son premier livre de poésie. Comme les autres titres de sa bibliographie, c’est un ouvrage fortement imprégné d’une fréquentation du numérique, des images qui circulent sur les réseaux et de leurs formats. 

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie’s work, pornography, and special effects. The title refers to the way the artist moves through different periods and aesthetic spaces, appropriating their codes in order to construct new visual fictions. The book is infused with post-#MeToo feminist thinking, alternative uses of biography, reflections on the art world, and contemporary debates surrounding appropriation, embodiment, and the status of the artwork.

McKenzie and Canet worked with each other for over eight years, on projects like Atelier E.B: Passer-by catalogue, published on the occasion of the Fondation Galeries Lafayette exhibition, or the book Pervert or Detective, a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and artist Reba Maybury. This collaboration now culminated in an exhibition and a book: Plastic Newspaper (presented at CRAC Sète in March 2026) and Lucy McKenzie, The Tenant.

Texts by Marie Canet and Lucy McKenzie
Translations: Catherine Petit & Paul Buck (Marie Canet), Juliette Desorgues (Lucy McKenzie)

Published in connection with the exhibition Lucy McKenzie, Plastic Newspaper, at Crac Occitanie, Centre régional d‘art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée à Sète, 21.03.-06.09.26

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

fanta for the ghosts by Elisabeth Molin

120mm x 210mm
edition of 500

Co-published with OneThousandBooks and Elisabeth Molin

Who claims abstraction? What are the limits of abstraction? Are statelessness, dislocation and feelings of (un) belonging embodiments of an abstracted self that is in itself a work in progress? How could performance art—an artistic practice that places significant importance on presence and legibility of form—transgress into the realm of the abstract and the illegible in an effort to protect the artist’s likeness while shedding light on what it means to be in their body in relation to this world?

Chipo Chipaziwa’s My Mother My Home establishes itself as a query on the aspects of belonging and the artist’s own personhood that acts as the foundation of her practice. The question of where one’s personhood begins and ends within an artwork has appeared to be ever prevalent within the realm of visual art and is more relevant within the canon of performance art.

Writers: Chipo Chipaziwa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Olumoroti George

Contributing artists: Margaret Joba-Woodruff, Sophia Lapres, and David Ezra Wang
Edited by Katrina Geotjen

David Hoyle (b.1962, Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a performance and visual artist. His work over the last 30+ years has referenced gender, politics, identity, mental health issues and the ongoing fight for equality.

Hoyle came to prominence in the ‘90s as The Divine David, a kind of anti-drag queen whose lacerating social commentary – targeting both bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene, which he called, “the biggest suicide cult in history” – was offset by breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm. Following a couple of outré late-night Channel 4 TV shows and a part in the movie Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes, Hoyle killed off The Divine David, during a spectacular show at the Streatham International Ice Arena in 2000 and retreated to Manchester for “a period of reflection”.

He returned to television screens in 2005 in Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley, then began performing live again, under his own name. Hoyle’s biting satire, bravura costumes, wicked comic timing, and compelling charisma remained intact.

Hoyle is also a prolific painter often painting in his live shows. His paintings are deeply personal, and tackle the same themes as his performances, incorporating domestic waste, flyers, newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, and more, which reinforce his disdain for the ruling-class bourgeoisie.

This is the first book dedicated to Hoyle’s paintings, offering an edited selection of works made between 2010 and 2022. At Hoyle’s request, all of the works are published undated: thus, emphasising their timelessness, timeliness, relevance, and urgency to the desperate age in which we now find ourselves!