Books

Partie sur les sites de la dernière briqueterie artisanale de Riemst et de la recyclerie de briques d'Alexander van Mosselaer, Juliet Mérie en ramène un récit poétique qui explore notre rapport à la matière vivante et questonne le cours de la vie. 

Loin d'être un documentaire, ses photographies créent un rapport ambigu entre la perception des espaces visités et l'allégorie qui s'installe. La possière se soulève pour dévoiler les lieux de vie et de mort des briques qui dessinent le paysage belge. 

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who’s who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno’s use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s.

Subduing Demons in America offers the best of Giorno’s revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art–influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lakiriboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide – with explosive results. 

When her grandmother dies in the night, Moremi’s fate falls to her uncle, the grasping family chief who sends her off to work as a housemaid in Lagos. On arriving there, Moremi finds that the big city is not all she thought it would be. But she’s not alone. After another family death, Kudirat, accused of bringing misfortune to her close family, has also been sent to live as a maid in the same house, scrubbing floors and folding laundry for long-suffering Tola, whose abusive doctor husband refuses to treat. Together, with the help of her queer aunt Morieba, the four women must wrestle back control of their lives as the patriarchal traditions that govern the family push back against their freedoms. When Tola’s condition worsens, someone new emerges, someone with revenge and redemption in mind. 

Mixing family saga, mobster pulp, and queer coming-of age, Lakiriboto is a staggeringly original and surprising novel about Nigeria’s queer and feminist communities, the struggles they face, and the lengths they will go to to overcome them. 

What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two places at once.

The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking.

Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing.

The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!

”The domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices. The works of these pages instantiate (as compositions) and contemplate (as critical texts) the differing degrees in which techniques of the body enter into dynamic relation with modes of inscription, forming a feedback loop that co-constitutes their capacities. To this degree, an aural poetics – in opposition to the vast discourse of its homonym – can evade the facile separation of an essentialized “oral” and “written,” veer away from the technological determinism and psychosocial developmental model that commentators have grafted upon this faux binary, and compel us to imagine and examine composition across artistic practices through assessing specific articulations of materials and occasion. Here, listening is manifold.” (Michael Nardone)

With contributions by: Alexandre St-Onge, Amber Rose Johnson, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Anne Bourne, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Cecilia Vicuña, Constance DeJong, Dalie Giroux, Damon Krukowski, Danny Snelson, Diane Glancy, Dylan Robinson, Eyvind Kang, François Lemieux, Gail Scott, Heather Davis, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Henri Meschonnic, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Jerome Ellis, John Melillo, Laura Ortman, Lauren Turner, Lewis Freedman, Lisa Robertson, Luke Nickel, Marcus Boon, Marshall Trammel, Max Ritts, Merlin Sheldrake, Michael Nardone, Mitchell Akiyama, Nicholas Komodore, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Patrick Nickleson, Raven Chacon, Raymond Boisjoly, Sophie Seita, Stacy Doris, Steven Feld + Xenia Benivolski, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Tiziana La Melia + Ellis Sam, Tom Miller, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

toi, moi, la pluie is a sequence of cards that can be assembled into three-dimensional configurations. The cards present two sides of the same moment: rain falling outdoors, and an art exhibition taking place indoors.

With humour and a sense of casual abandon, Sara Graça reduces the exhibition space to a dry place offering shelter from the rain. Despite a moment of intense intimacy—a passionate kiss—the space is largely inhabited by figures who do not seem to know one another, or to get along. The same kiss takes place outdoors; lovers, after all, do not care about the weather. Drawn in a caricatural style, recalling Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look series, these characters speak English, French, and Portuguese. We cannot tell whether they are visiting or staying; we do not know where they are.

The cards are accompanied by a small cut-out horse that can also be assembled and added. A memory of a past life, a lingering presence, a sense of “other”, the horse becomes the final piece of the puzzle. It acts as an exclamation point to these otherwise trivial human exchanges—cutting across inside and outside, shelter and rain, intimacy, cohabitation, and distance.

The publication is disguised as a book, revealing its playful nature only once opened, and inviting the reader to assemble, rearrange, and make choices of their own.

Sara Graça (Lisbon, 1993) lives in London and works in interdisciplinary ways, mainly using sculpture, drawing, photography and video. Her practice often questions ideas of value, authenticity and impermanence.

All copies are numbered & signed.

The Pastoral Concert marks the first English translation of enigmatic filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau’s early written work Le Concert champêtre, begun in 1968, some fifteen years before his debut film.

Rousseau continued shaping the work as a screenplay until its rejection by the Centre National de la Cinématographie in 1983, whereupon he turned his efforts to the production of Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (1983) instead. Unrealized, Le Concert champêtre became the matrix from which Rousseau’s subsequent films would emerge.

Taking its title and three central characters (A, B, and C) from the eponymous painting long attributed to Giorgione and now to Titian, The Pastoral Concert begins as a letter written by a young man to his cousin in the countryside on the eve of her wedding, before mutating into a diary entry, a screenplay, and finally a film imagined through the failure of its own realization. Through this instability of form, The Pastoral Concert expresses, in the words of Jean-Marie Straub, “something magnificent [and] entirely different from a screenplay or a découpage.”

Translated from the French by artist and filmmaker Kevin Weil, this edition includes an extensive appendix of extra-diegetic materials written by Rousseau, as well as correspondence with contemporaries such as Dominique Noguez, Marcel Hanoun, and Jean-Marie Straub, which form a picture of the work’s early reception.

Tendrils threads through grief, joy and solidarity toward futures shaped by collaboration and care. Reaching through ecological crises, these poems seek new ways of living kinship in the more-than-human world.

This anthology gathers international voices that entangle, illuminate and resist: a collective turn to the future with renewal and possibility.

Edited and introduced by fieldnotes collective: Pratyusha, Jessica J. Lee, Alycia Pirmohamed and Nina Mingya Powles.

With contributions by Shasta Hanif Ali, Hala Alyan, Hana Pera Aoake, Polly Atkin, Kara Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Kat Benedict, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Corinna Board, Jody Chan, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Carlina Duan, Chloe Elliott, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Sophie Hoyle, Petero Kalulé (petals), Bhanu Kapil, Jayant Kashyap, Maija Makela, Lola Olufemi, Carl Phillips, Nat Raha, Shumin Tan, Dženana Vucic and Alice Willitts.

OEI #112–113: A Cosmology of Bliss concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) began the project in 1942 while a stateless refugee in the Shanghai International Settlement, and who, after emigrating to the Australian beach town of Coogee, worked on it for the rest of his life. After 30 years of obscurity, the language was picked up as a communication system for nonverbal children in a small hospital school in Canada, with great promise. This, however, led to acrimony between its creator and its first genuine users, who sought to amend it for their needs—an event which Charles likened to ‘a new Babel of symbols’.

A Cosmology of Bliss reconsiders the histories, forms, and dreams of Bliss and its many contributors. It includes a new picaresque biography of Charles, the chemical engineer, wounded refugee, and amateur semanticist; essays that draw out affinities and resistances, such as with the history of 20c Australian poetry and experimental pedagogy; unpublished material from Bliss’s manuscripts and correspondences, including an extensive selection of the barely-published Blissymbols Picture Book—Charles’s final work; and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. Together they seek to lodge Bliss into the history of Australian visual art and poetry as a remarkable exception. Against received accounts of a failed auxiliary language or an outmoded therapeutic aid, A Cosmology of Bliss is the first study to insist that Bliss is a poetic project. Taken as such, the symbols begin to speak—silently—of a world of lucky faults, chemical grammars, speechless inscriptions, and untenable, incandescent loves.

with Dr. Charles K. Bliss & his devoted coworkers: Javant Biarujia, Claire Bliss, Christopher Brennan, Melinda Bufton, Alexis Carrel, Brendan Casey, Justin Clark, Mitchel Cumming, Gabriel Curtin, Jesse Darling, Douglas Everingham, Michael Farrell, Elisa Gabbert, Samantha Gorman, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sam de Groot, Gail Hastings, Julian Huxley, Martin Johnston, Alfred Korzybski, Ruark Lewis, Aodhan Madden, Ern Malley, Rowan McNaught, Shirley McNaughton, Tom Melick, Quenton Miller, Robert Milne, Anthony O’Donnell, Ouyang Yu, Victoria Perin, Oscar Perry, π.O., Lisa Radford, Oliver Reiser, Bertrand Russell, Mark von Schlegell, Imogen Stidworthy, Brian Stride, Ella Sutherland, Sam Szoke-Burke, Elisa Taber, Peter Tyndall, Lucy Van, Ania Walwicz, Margaret Woodward, Tim Woodward, Tom Wright, Xu Bing, Jarrod Zlatic, etc.

2 poems written with AI assisted neural network.

In Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on genre and the ethical work of writing, championing the imagination as a vital instrument of freedom. Illuminating the making of major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin argues for science fiction and fantasy as literary modes that sustain philosophical, political and emotional inquiry.

This wide-ranging collection considers artistic responsibility, the uses of myth, the craft of storytelling, and the role of the writer as teacher and public intellectual. It charts Le Guin’s emergence as one of the defining literary voices of the twentieth century, while also considering what she calls the ‘journey of self-knowledge’ – a psychic and moral journey into the unconscious, whose perils and rewards are best expressed through the symbolic language of dreams, fantasy and fairy tales.

The fate of our freedom is among the most important topics for philosophy. All animals have to set themselves apart from their surroundings. Whenever they fail to break free from space, they are not only unfree but effectively become nothing. In our case, we emancipate ourselves with our hands and feet and membranes; but uniquely also through our representations of ourselves in the world, which is to say, through geography.

The Mouth That Eats Itself (2026) follows geographical thought from its inception to its descent into fang-toothed self-contradiction. In the course of identifying how and when geography makes us free, a terrible trap is set: a portrait that devours its unwary creator by raising the well-worn conflict between freedom and necessity to a transcendental level. The katabasis of geography’s logic is not a matter of idle inconsistency but an information hazard directly related to the fate of animals that lose their contours and disappear.

To reach this conclusion, Carl Olsson draws a diagonal line between ideas and images, from careful exegesis of Kant’s first Critique to countless vivid examples involving praying mantises, chameleons, geometry and owl-eyed butterflies. The ambient payoff is undeniable: you learn as much about the world as you do about yourself, and Olsson’s stunning vocabulary and precise choice of words never ceases to entertain.

Carl Olsson is a geographer and writer interested in how geographical thought impacts the human body. His work tells stories about geographers and other animals that get lost in space, extracting philosophical implications from scenarios that span the mundane and the otherworldly.

PRESCRIPTIONS is a transcription of a handwritten manuscript, dated to approximately 1650, containing a wide range of medicinal and magical remedies. Currently housed in the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection, it is assumed this practical handbook was a reference for healing, midwifery, and other medical/magical advice. Recipes and instruction cover various methods of purging, ointments for swellings, fevers, and pain reduction, lotions for venereal disease, advice for childbirth, and dilemmas such as “worms in the ear.” Accompanying these medicinal prescriptions are a series of magical prescriptions: charms, rituals, and spells recorded to fortify the ailing body, induce amorous desire, or seek revenge.

With its mix of Latin words, Early Modern English parlance, colloquial plant names, apothecary weights, and archaic medical terms, the recipes can at first appear opaque, but with sustained engagement one can begin to decipher the logics and structures within the writer(s)' shorthand. The original manuscript, in having its own detailed glossary, index, and citations, exhibits a meticulous cataloging of knowledge and resources, and reveals an earnest desire to hold onto the integrity and sanctity of the body in the face of 'many evils.'

The transcription is accompanied by a glossary of terms, an explanation of the various apothecary measurements used, and expanded citations of the medicinal/magical treatises that were abbreviated within the original text.

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.

"The impossible takes a little longer. [pen scribbling]"

Presented at Kransen in Borgerhout, 1—3 March 2024, with an exhibition titled Dog Ears and a remote reading by fellow-Stockholmian artist Dave Allen.

Since 2011, the Velvetyne collective has been dedicated to creating and distributing typefaces under open-source licenses. Its members advocate and promote an uninhibited typographic practice, guided by political principles and aesthetic risk-taking.

This monograph celebrates a generous collective creation—pioneering and recognized on the international scene—that continually questions and reinvents itself. Velvetyne Saved My Life reveals the distinctive workings of this unconventional structure within the contemporary type foundry landscape, its commitment to free-culture and open-source principles, its singular editorial policy, and its pedagogical practice.

The book is structured around a polyphonic interview conducted by Sandra Chamaret with the members of the collective, a series of in-depth articles on emblematic typefaces from the foundry, as well as an exhaustive catalogue of the more than 70 fonts published by nearly as many international authors. 

Halfway between text and type specimen, this book is both a story to read and a manifesto to see.

The first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artists' collective: unpublished documents, images, photographs, and manifestos are accompanied by new creative, political, and historical contributions, evoking the collective joy of Le Nemesiache's history so as to bring a sense of myth back into the world, rewriting and embodying it anew.

Nemesiache is an informal feminist group co-founded in Naples in 1970 by the multidisciplinary and visionary artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre (1946-2002). The collective, which included up to twelve women (centered around Claudia Aglione, Fausta Base, Silvana Campese, Consuelo Campone, Conni Capobianco, Bruna Felletti, Anna Grieco, and Teresa Mangiacapre), fostered an experimental artistic practice and a way of being in the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi, and radical imagination, while also introducing "transfeminism" in the early '80s. 

Throughout their long-lasting practice spanning several decades, the group retrieved an androgynous mythosophy to transcend art as mere representation and challenge the feminine as a modern identity category. Their distinct transformative approach within both Italian and Western feminist art history led not only to the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice—encompassing film, performance, writing, rituals, poetry, music, collage, costumes, protests, and conferences—but also the creation of a new political language, grounded in cosmological creativity and justice through mythological rituals.

Edited by Sonia D'Alto.
Texts by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Sonia D'Alto, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Imma Tralli & Roberto Pontecorvo, Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zapperi, Arnisa Zeqo.

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.

Feminist Theory established bell hooks as one of international feminism’s most challenging and influential voices. This edition includes a preface by the author, reflecting on the book’s impact and the development of her ideas since it was first published. 

In this beautifully written and carefully argued work, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism’s reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the involvement, leadership, and centrality of women of colour and poor women in the movement for women’s liberation. Hooks argues that feminism’s goal of seeking credibility and acceptance on already existing ground – rather than demanding the lasting and more fundamental transformation of society – has short-changed the movement.

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, Feminist Theory argues that contemporary feminists must acknowledge the full complexity and diversity of women’s experience to create a mass movement to end women’s oppression.

A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why?

Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory—ancestral, personal, and poetic—and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art.

Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (2023). She is also the author of the prose book Animal (2019) and a forthcoming book about Sappho, as well as the editor of Essays (2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (2013). Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other places.

Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.

They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."

Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021