Books

Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw.  This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.

Translated by Julia Sanches.

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life.

The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination.

The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

With figures X, Y, and Z, Fanny Howe constructs "a repressed but emotional history" of encounters and unions between races, classes, genders, and epochs. Considering race as "the most random quality assigned to a soul," Howe has undertaken an (American) history of a racially mixed population. The work bears evidence to many creative unions as well: with Ben Watkins, who provided the photographs; with graphic artist Maceo Senna, who illustrated the text; with Nya Patrinos, set designer, video artist, and director of the original production; as well as with composers Miles Anderson and Erica Sharp, whose score adds another voice to the spoken three. The book includes a link to an audio recording of the work, originally performed at the Porter Troupe gallery in San Diego, 1997, with Paul Miles (X), Stephanie French (Y), and Andre Canty (Z). "So whiteness is what is dependent on a witness. / The moon's opaque and egg-like sheen is the kind of zero / that wants to be more than air and negativity."

A day can be a composition not unlike an essay. Full of possibilities, full of limitations, bound by universal structures and marked by idiosyncratic desires. You go on walks. You read. You do your chores. All the while memory and other forms of imagination keep time with you. Books are strange companions; writing is a lonely thing rich with consolations.

Certain Things is a text by Claudia La Rocco, created with and through ideas such as these.

Published September 2022.

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

The 2025 Ringier annual report (artist's book).

Since 1998, Ringier, the Swiss-based global media company, has traditionally commissioned an artist to design its annual report. Publisher Michael Ringier and curator Beatrix Ruf initiated this series as a means of reinforcing the links between art and the activities of the company.

For the 2025 edition, Slavs and Tatars' Simurgh Self-Help revisits Marcel Broodthaers' seminal work Musée d'Art Moderne: Département des Aigles (1968–1972), replacing or "translating" the eagle—a symbol of power and empire that is used to challenge our understanding of authority and value—with the Simurgh, a mythical bird found across the Turkic-Persianate world. Whilst the eagle is often associated with nation-states and masculinity, the Simurgh is decidedly transnational, metaphysical, and flamboyant, if not gender-fluid.

Much like the collective's geographic remit—between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China—this publication attempts to shift our focus elsewhere, eastwards, to regions which too often fall through the cracks of historiography and art history. If modern and contemporary art institutions in Broodthaers' time were largely situated between the Rhineland and Northeast United States, the multipolarity of today's art world is a fait accompli: with biennials in Uzbekistan and museums in Kazakhstan, amongst others, rivalling the traditional centers of power.

Once too a sacred bird—accompanying Zeus, for example—the eagle has, over the past two millennia, undergone a thorough profanation: a brawny, secular flex of nationalism. It would be remiss not to see the parallels in the world of media: print itself and the act of reading, once an activity for the few and anointed, has undergone a similar dynamic of democratization over the past several centuries and, especially in recent years with the internet, a vulgarization which would make medieval Church elders wag their shriveled fingers at us in an I-told-you-so meme meant for the ages. This profanation has challenged the very institution of media and the narratives it disseminates, much as important works of institutional critique challenged contemporary art in the 1970s and beyond—akin to Slavs and Tatars' genre-bending mix of high and low, East and West, sacred and profane does today.

Slavs and Tatars' (founded 2006) extensive publishing activity—some 15 books in 20 years—has treated subjects as diverse as alphabet politics, Uighur literary culture, political satire in the Muslim world, and German anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Alongside sculptures, textile works, installations, sound pieces, and even a brick-and-mortar Pickle Bar in Berlin, the collective's books have cleared new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production that draws on popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective's work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. 

Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus, Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010) and are currently preparing solo engagements at Vienna's Secession,  Museum of Modern Art, New York and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both.

Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

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.

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

A collection of portraits by original riot grrrl, filmmaker, and zine queen, G.B. Jones. All of them witches – from the silverscreen, woodlands, and the streets.

Featuring provocative essays by Caroline Azar, Paul P., Leafshimmer, Jenna Danchuk, Blake Baron Ray, and Scott Treleaven – each exploring how witches have been perceived, presented, and portrayed in popular culture. “Realer than real, stranger than fiction.” 

PRAISE FOR G.B. JONES WITCHES

Witches by G.B. Jones is a summoning spell posing as a book, a paper potion like the potion Nicky gives Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle. It draws me to it and to what’s in it, Jones’ divine drawings of the witches we both worship, the witches of TV and film and true life. I go to it gladly. I go to it gayly. I pore over it and prize it and purr like Pyewacket.

— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

G.B. Jones is the original Foxy Genius. Her zines, drawings, music, and Super 8 films inspired both the Queer zine explosion and the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90s. Witches sees G.B. once again crafting her magic.

— Kathleen Hanna, singer, writer, artist, and front-woman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre

With her illustrated procession of witches, post-punk icon G.B. Jones acts as medium to a dazzling diversity of disrupters from across screen history, as well as a pantheon of real-life hellraisers, from Sybil Leek and Rosaleen Norton to Vali Myers and beyond – all woven through with astute commentary by a host of countercultural collaborators. A captivating book; I was certainly under its spell.

— Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women

This eighth instalment of BFTK is on letters and letters. It takes the double meaning of this word as its point of dispatch, inviting recipients to think through and respond to — directly and indirectly — ideas around correspondence, addressing and alphabets. What it means to be in correspondence with somebody, the initiation and continuation of this communicative exchange and what happens when it is severed or lost. How to write directly towards a you, to you; to a particular reader, object, locale. The volume is littered with letters. There are letters about letters, letters to letters, letters that crease, fold, tear and rip, letters that are sent and lost, found and read. There are letters that pile up, their combinations arranged and rearranged to form comprehensive linguistic logics, and there are letters that are simply letters. Contributions sit in eight-page signatures, of which there are twenty-six in total. Of the eight hundred bound copies, twenty-six are left unbound, returned to discrete correspondence, loose abécédaire units for exchange — letters to be leafed through and addressed once more.

PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR
SHADOW IN THAT MIRROR
Chang Yuchen
(pp.1–8, A)

BESTIARY FOR A NON-GENETIC DESCENDANT
Bhanu Kapil
(pp.9–16, B)

THROW STUFF AWAY
Hannah Regel
(pp.17–24, C)

THE MOON HATH XXX DAYS:
LETTERS FOR LETTERS
Helen Marten
(pp.25–32, D)

WHAT DOES THE LOSS FEEL LIKE?
Meg Miller
(pp.33–48, E, F)

LIGHT UP THE A
Kate Briggs
(pp.49–56, G)

THE POSTCODE CONNECTION
Rebecca Ross
(pp.57–72, H, I)

(LETTER) TO S… LABYRINTH-CORTEX
Michèle Métail, trans. Thea Petrou
(pp.73–80, J)

RACKETY CORRESPONDENCES /
A CORRESPONDING RACKET
Nisha Ramayya
(pp.81–96, K, L)

THE COIN OF THE REALM
Lucie Elven
(pp.97–104, M)

UNFOLDING FOLDED FANTASIES:
A CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE SEATED SCRIBE
Fatema Abdoolcarim
(pp.105–112, N)

DEAR DEAREST DEAR MOTHER
Alice Butler
(pp.113–120, O)

/ DON’T BOTHER THE CREASE
Tice Cin
(pp.121–128, P)

FEELING LETTERS, SEEING BLUE
Gemma Blackshaw
(pp.129–144, Q, R)

LINES OF GRACE AND DISGRACE
Francis Haselden
(pp.145–152, S)

AN ABC OF MIMICRY
Jeffrey Stuker & Jan Tumlir
(pp.153–176, T, U, V)

ADDRESS
Céline Mathieu
(pp.177–184, W)

MY VOICE FOLDS YOU
Thea Petrou
(pp.185–192, X)

A LONG DISTANCE LULLABY
Vibeke Mascini
(pp.193–200, Y)

DEBT OF GOLD CAN BE PAID OFF,
DEBT OF KINDNESS IS CARRIED OVER DEATH
Chang Yuchen
(pp.201–208, Z)

LETTERS ON LETTERS
FROM LETTERS ON LETTERS
Matthew Stuart
(covers)

In these poems, Samer Abu Hawwash stands upon ancient and modern ruins, engaging with the archetypal Arabic qasida and its echoes in the present, set against a backdrop of exile, displacement, and genocide. The site of the ruin, the journey, and the return home are the three movements of the archetypal Arabic form with which Samer contends in his book-length poem. 

Writing in and from the moment of crisis, the poet keeps returning to ruins, forfeiting the journey and the hope of return and resolution, rearranging the elements of poetry in the Arabic tradition in search of closure or consolation—in a gesture, a shadow, a memory, an object. The five poems that follow “Ruins” in this book root themselves in monumental loss. When “it no longer matters if anyone loves us” and “we will lose this war,” nothing remains but the poem, the witness, the signpost in the wasteland of history.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

No Place Press is collaborating with Jalal Toufic on an ambitious publishing project: The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic. Spanning three volumes of more than six hundred pages each, the series gathers re-edited versions of his earlier works alongside two newly written books, arranged and organized by the author himself. For new readers, the volumes provide an introduction to Toufic’s central concepts—including the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer’s two bodies—while for longtime readers they offer a comprehensive view of more than three decades of thought, presented in their most rigorous and fully articulated form. Yet, in keeping with Toufic’s practice—which participates in untimely collaboration (including with future filmmakers, thinkers, and artists) and abides in the suspension of the avenir of messianism/Mahdism—some of these works remain forthcoming even after their inclusion in the Collected Writings.

Volume 1 (2025) includes newly revised editions of Toufic’s first three books—Distracted (1991/2003); (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003); and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009)—together with the script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and, new, The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024).

Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Don’t say “Rest in Peace,” say Fuck the Police: A Sean Bonney Tribute Portfolio, featuring: Katharina Ludwig, Lama El Khatib & Haytham El Wardany, Anahid Nersessian, Vicky Sparrow, Koshka Duff, Max Henninger, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, D.S. Marriott, Fran Lock, Joey Frances, Mathilda Cullen, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Eve Richens, Sacha Kahir, Uwe Möllhusen & Marie Schubenz, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Linda Kemp, Daniel Eltringham & Fred Carter, Hugo García Manríquez, Jèssica Pujol Duran & Macarena Urzúa Opazo. With additional work by Belén Roca, translated by Noah Mazer, Adelaide Ivánova, translated by Chris Daniels, stevie redwood, Cait O’Kane, Mau Baiocco, Peter Bouscheljong, translated by Jonathan Styles. Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Zhou Xiaojing, Mayamor, translated by Eric Abalajon, Afrizal Malna, translated by Daniel Owen, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, translated by Shook, James Goodwin, Amalia Tenuta. Plus Engagements: Anne Boyer interviewed by Eduardo Rabassa, Gail Scott interviewed by Michael Nardone, Noah Ross on David Melnick, Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pedro Pietri, Coco Fitterman on Ennio Moltedo, Sam Moore on Aaron Shurin, David Grundy on Lorenzo Thomas

Dans l’imaginaire collectif, l’œuf évoque la fragilité et la promesse de vie, tandis que la pierre renvoie à la permanence et à la disparition. Cette édition tente de déplacer cette opposition à travers une forme fragmentaire. Il rassemble des notes écrites au fil du temps. Sa production suit cette logique : imprimé en offset, le projet prend en compte les formats de papier afin d’en optimiser l’usage. Les chutes sont utilisées dans un cahier complémentaire, rassemblant textes et images laissés en marge. La reliure, cousue à la main au fil de coton, reste simple et légère. L’objet se conçoit comme quelque chose à manipuler et découvrir, entre publication et transmission plus intime. 

« J’ai donc cherché une forme simple, en évitant tout formalisme superflu. Le projet repose sur une question : est-il nécessaire de produire ce type d’objet, et pourquoi ? » 

In the collective imagination, the egg suggests fragility and the promise of life, while stone evokes permanence and disappearance. This edition seeks to move beyond this opposition through a fragmentary form. It gathers notes written over time. Its production follows the same logic: printed in offset, the project takes paper formats into account in order to optimize their use. Offcuts are used in a supplementary section, gathering texts and images left aside. The binding is hand-sewn with cotton thread, remaining simple and lightweight. The object is conceived as something to handle and discover, between publication and a more intimate form of transmission. 

“So I sought a simple form, avoiding unnecessary formalism. The project rests on a question: is it necessary to produce this type of object, and why?”

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture. —Torrey Peters

Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter. — Stephen Ira, Poetry Project

What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself. — Dominic Fox, Review 31

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. 

In 1971, the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris. The magazine—a whisper on the literary landscape that appeared three years after Boulus’s arrival in the US—brings together work by Boulus and several of his literary friends, in translation by Boulus and Etel Adnan.

Tigris was not an end in itself, but rather a temporary solution to the lifelong problem of how to devote oneself to poetry across different countries, eras, and styles: how to live poetry. Yet, in so doing, the small anthology includes significant work: Etel Adnan’s “Jebu,” translated by Adnan, and poetry by Boulus, Fouad Rifkah, Yusuf al-Khal, Mouayad al-Rawi, and Riadh Fakhouri, all in Boulus’s translations, as well as a work by Ankido, a “street-activist poet-café worker of importance to the Palestinian Liberation Movement.”

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.