"cutt press"

Labour of Tongues is a document of poetry that records, but saves nothing. It asks, how to stay with pain?
This archive is build out of two channels, two voices running parallel to one another. In one an elder speaks, in the other a knot of generational fabulation.

Here, the poem and flesh serve as ushers for pain. Through imitation and declaration this archive becomes a container for disorganised storytelling, disorder, grief, translation, the loss of language, and affection.

I do
nothing I need
no one
I loose my keys

they were on the door 
outside

THE HOLE. AN INSURRECTIONARY POETICS by Katharina Ludwig was recently published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. In parallel/in interruption with this book are three opuscules—The Oracle of Lips, The Oracle of Tongue, and The Oracle of Teeth.

“At the limits of language, a hole opens and voices meet, channelled from the abyss through temporalities and histories. Jacques Lacan analyses the wounded text; Hélène Cixous whispers to anarchist poet Katerina Gogou; theorist Carla Lonzi, artist Chiara Fumai, and her army of women dissidents invade the symbolic realm of father, state, law, and religion. A canon of disorderly voices from philosophy, psychoanalysis, poetry, and fictional characters converse, connected by the appearance of K. The Hole is an epistolary work written in multiple forms, approaching the unsayable in a jouissant textual body, considering broken narratives and minor literatures through an investigation of (textual) holes, wounds (trauma), and the mouth (voice/language). Poetry operates as strategy of resistance and revolt, against systemic power structures and against closure. Wounds must stay open to speak.”

3x zines, Varying sizes, Hand sewn

These proverbs were originally published in 2018 in Vancouver by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. With permission from the author the text has been styled into a bootleg and risoprinted in medium blue ink.

“Menopause, Gardanne said in 1821, is the loss of the signs of female reproductive ability. ‘Huge dangers’, he warned, ‘precede, accompany, follow the cessation of this function’. The illustration on the cover of his book shows a broken ceramic pitcher. Gardanne was at the forefront of what now would be called the ‘medicalisation of menopause’, which is to say, its treatment as an ailment, both physical and psychosomatic, of the female body.”

Proverbs of a She-Dandy elaborates on a persistent theme in feminist art and literature over many past decades: a skeptical yet desirous exploration of the flâneur as a figure of agency for women. Robertson finds in Charles Baudelaire’s dandy a tangible presence for old women in public spaces.

A collection of notes, pictures, social media posts, about the legendary “Piss Goblin” who is / was (?) active in the Berghain bathrooms. This edition – handmade by Cutt Press – beautifully + playfully embodies its subject, as orange plasticky sheets are interspersed in between the text pages, and marble paper half-covers shimmer, in an evocation of golden torrents . . .

Give Piss a Chance. A Williing Suspension of Consequences was first published in the context of the For Real exhibition at DAADGalerie, Berlin, in 2025.

‘Bodywork for the hybrid body of an institution’ traces the visible and invisible dynamics within self-organized spaces. This publication is not guided by instructions, but offers glimpses into shimmering moments of dissent, togetherness and re-doing the anatomy of institution by including its entangled ecologies. It is an invitation into the visceral sensation of bodywork through the very act of reading.

Francis Laurie Schaffer—an artist in her mid-40s—has recently separated from her husband after a two-decade long marriage and has fallen in love with a polyamorous young man who doesn’t fully reciprocate her feelings. In an attempt to express her dissatisfaction, she begins writing about the relationships between the people she imagines belong to her polycule. But things begin to shift into a game of mirrors when Francis meets some of the people she’s written about. A series of events will then culminate with Francis and her friends crashing the 40th birthday party of her husband’s new girlfriend. A disastrous outcome serves as a rite of passage, delivering the protagonists onto the other side of that experience with a transformed sense of self.

Bootleg edition by Cutt Press. 

Foreword by Gloria Anzaldua.

Drawing on religion, mythology, folklore, anthropology, history and the arts, this encyclopoedia is a collection of queer spirit. It contains articles on the world's spiritual traditions; entries on deities, symbols, spiritual teachers, spiritually focused artists; and related subjects.

Did you know that in medieval French folklore a person might change sex by passing under a rainbow? Or that same-sex unions have been celebrated by peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, China, and indigenous America? Or that Sappho, da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Nijinsky, Benjamin Britten, Mishima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Boy George, and Derek Jarman number among those who have explored the spiritual dimension of gender and sexuality in their works? While the terms many of us employ today to identify ourselves – ‘queer’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgendered’ – differ markedly from those of peoples of other times and places, we are nevertheless the bearers of a rich spiritual history that has been ignored or suppressed, a history encoded in sacred texts as well as in works of art, music, dance and other media. Drawing upon religion, mythology, folklore, anthropology, history and the arts, the Encyclopedia is a cornucopia of queer spirituality, containing over 1,500 alphabetically arranged entries from Aakulujjuusi to Zeus.

Tongue Touching the Other / Dil Ötekine Değince is a result of a research project on the Turkish language and its exchanges mainly with Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish. Through language, it aims to follow a common, transnational history and how modern national identities affected our knowledge of that history, and sense of belonging. However, as much as commons, varied forms and dimensions of marginalization are also deeply embedded in our history, culture, language, and as a result, in our everyday lives and in our collective unconsciousness. This book is an attempt to rethink the social, economic & cultural contexts of identity and the concept of “othering” and reflect on inherited motives of imperial and colonial structures, racism, colourism, classism & gender roles.

The book was created through a multi-layered process involving research, conversations, and design. The research phase explored academic texts, etymology, and visual culture to uncover narratives of commons and division. Conversations with 18 people across 9 countries—based on trust and anonymity—provided personal, subjective insights, recorded between July 2022 and January 2025. These dialogues were transcribed and, rather than presented chronologically, were edited into a montage alongside archival visuals and texts, shaping the book's four-chapter narrative:

Yabancı / Stranger / یابان
Misafir / Guest / مسافر
Eğitim / Education
Temsil / Representation / تمثيل

"We collect, translate and publish texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza, to lift up their words. We urge you to share, print, publish and distribute these texts by all possible means, in support of Palestinian struggle for liberation. All volunteers in this project remain anonymous as a sign of respect and humility towards our people in Gaza. Any financial income generated from these texts is the property of the people in Gaza and must be directed back to them in full." - @gazapassages

Texts by:
Hiba Abu Nada
Hind Joudeh
Mahmoud Jouda
Noor Aldeen Hajjaj
Nour Al Swirki
Ahmed Mourtaja
Al Miqdad Jamil Miqdad
Beesan Nateel
Esam Hani Hajjaj
Ebraheem Matar
Husam Maarouf

All rights reserved to the people of Palestine

Printed by CUTT PRESS at Hopscotch Reading Room

‘Why We Can’t Wait: Listening to Martin Luther King’s Call for the Contemporary World’ (2024) by Anthony Bogues is a pamphlet initiated by Kennedy Hollins; it is a transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Bogues at the 2023 Martin Luther King annual lecture at Vrije Universitett Amsterdam.

“Martin Luther King Jr, in his time had identified that one of major problems facing the world was militarism. Today that militarism is not confined to the USA, it has enveloped many other states. When that militarism is combined with new forms of violence which seek to extinguish the imagination then the world is in an unknown place. One made not for the living or the dying, but rather for destroying and conquering. Violence / war is action. It is accompanied by speech which makes the human- non human As violence / war perpetuates itself as power then the human disappears, and life becomes an experience in which we tell tales to give life in death. It is a dangerous moment in our human world and my hope is that the publication of this lecture might facilitate attempts to challenge this world . We certainly cannot wait.” - from the preface by Dr. Bogues

Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project, Corrections and Clarifications, is a newspaper without headlines, a cyclical reverse-chronology of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news, printed in numerous languages, locations, and formats since September 2001. An intermittent catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, obstinate patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The twentieth anniversary hardbound edition of the publication, entitled The Error is Regretted, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin.

This 2024 iteration, in a xeroxed edition of 100, collects corrections to news items back to 1981 — with its focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region, on patterns of mis-telling and misrepresentation through the persistent misuse of the passive voice, the omission of widely observable and verifiable facts and events, the euphemizing and toning down of deliberate actions, erasures through shifts in terminologies, through bold mistakes and tentative corrections.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, a taste for the possession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles. Anita uses widely varying sources: from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

An inscription of time at the coast, singing crows, albatrosses and seagulls. STOP. Extracted from the earth a whole alphabet. The waves uplifted countries and washed mountains until the storm came undone. The plantation of tobacco was maintained among the meadows and cafes flourished as the core of erudition, the power was theirs - you could see it in cinema- the actors spoke feverishly with enthusiasm, rather than breathless, meticulous and austere. The scars healed on mysterious skin that came out of the shadow to cross the day.

A revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environment that unites radical politics and trans aesthetics. 

From a leading author and queer theorist known for reframing many of the most pressing questions about counter-intuitive ways of being. 

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. 

Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking, unbuilding, and ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan’s post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild, and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman’s anarchitectural experiments with language. 

By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.

Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic. These are conjuring poems; poems coming after collaboration—entanglement as conceit, as kink, as communion pleasure tactic. Smuggle in a sexy mirror, smuggle in a double-headed dildo, smuggle in a sentence then feel it read back: the author is reader is author is reader.

Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style. 

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. 

Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.

T is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. 

From the Afterword: "Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature."

What does a poet say (what does anyone say), when placed on the stand, how answer the binary logics forced like a cage in the legally-grounded violence which splittingly interrogates solidarity, the splitting invocation of law? In answer, T spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. The author writes: “I want the whole text to be a kind of horrific inorganic body with awkward parts, both to replay at the level of form some of the critiques of organicist thinking with reference to nature that the poem tries to articulate, and also, more glibly, to be somewhat like a trans body, awkwardly fitting together with some parts undercutting others”. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door. 

An A6 pocket pamphlet edition of Valerie Solanas’ diatribe against men and the world they have made.

This limited edition has a misprint on the front cover.

In 1967 Valerie Solanas wrote an essay, both stringent and ironic – critiquing men, and the way the male-dominated scientific and academic world wrote about women. The Society for Cutting Up Men was her proposed solution. Deeply sincere and roguishly tongue-in-cheek, it is an essay worth reading, both for its insight into the mind of a person who had undergone and would undergo significant trauma in her life, and also inflict trauma on others.

Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9th, 1936. She’s best known for writing The SCUM Manifesto, and of course, attempting to murder an artist called Andy Warhol, in 1968. Solanas had an extremely troublesome childhood. Abused by her father and grandfather, she then had a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather after her parents’ divorced. Solanas came out as a lesbian in the 1950s and relocated to Berkeley, California, where she wrote SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.

In Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic, Chris Tysh newly translates Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, compressing Jean Genet's disturbing 1943 novel into cuttingly charged verse. In the blue hours of the Parisian underworld, pimps, drag queens, and butchers in bloody aprons are joined by Divine, Mignon Dainty-Feet, and the young assassin Our Lady, three saintly figures in a forbidden realm of the senses.

Tysh cuts Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic into a ghostly song that traces the path from prose to lyric where Divine switches gender and names "as if passing under a scarlet awning." Suturing sexual otherness to an aching of gendered expectations, Tysh's cadences embrace postmodernism's emblematic penchant for all manner of appropriation, and recycling finds a radical iteration in the fashion of fairies, queens, and stool pigeons.

"This volume of verse, played over by a flickering ghostly flame, is perhaps the book that Genet meant to write..."—John Tranter

With an preface by Robert Glück.

The debut fiction collection from an inimitable critic, Truth & Dare is a deeply personal and fantastical ride through gender, trauma, queerness, science, history, and religion.

Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England's worst pogrom comes for York's particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London's famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.

Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it's been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.

A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.

So Mayer is a writer, indie bookseller, film curator, and pencil stan. Their most recent books are A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), a short essay on queer art, censorship and resistance, and <jacked a kaddish> (Litmus, 2018), a poetry sequence about interwar masculinity, technology and hats, and their BFI Film Classics on Orlando is forthcoming. Their work across genres and forms has been published internationally, including in Roxane Gay's anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, in several Criterion DVDs, and in Ignota Press's Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry. Plus their poetry once appeared on hoardings in Dublin. With Adam Zmith, they collaborated on Unreal Sex for Cipher, an anthology of queer SFFH, and on the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can't See, a tour through queer film history.

In Film Poems, readers find themselves with author Redell Olsen on the cutting-room floor of discourse, weaving together a manifesto of conceptual poetry that demonstrates the skipping and scratch of language. Just as really "seeing" a film is to experience our own vision—the technology that is always mediating our sight—really "reading" (a particular form of seeing) is to experience our own language as a constantly shifting medium; meanings emerge through ceaseless splicings and cuts.

Film Poems brings together Olsen's "Film Poem" works written for performance and installation in relation to films made and appropriated by her between 2007-2011. The five sequences splice together a range of contextual references from London landmarks, lace manufacturing, synchronized swimming, and the history of camouflage. Words unfold on the page as a film unspools from a reel, with particular attention paid to etymologies and polyvalences, to the process and performance of meaning-making and its relationship to physical manufacturing. "Words are the film between what is said and seen," writes Olsen, "and also the means of writing that something burning in the projector called language."

Redell Olsen's publications include FILM POEMS (Les Figues Press, 2014), PUNK FAUN: A BAR ROCK PASTEL (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press, 2000), and the collaboratively produced Here Are My Instructions (Redell Olsen / Susan Johanknecht) (Gefn, 2004). Her film poems, and texts for performance and film, include: Bucolic Picnic (or, toile de jouy camouflage) (2009), Newe Booke of Copies (2009-10), Lost Pool (2010), and SPRIGS & spots (2011-12). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international journal for modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics by women writers. She is the director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never simply be reduced to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city.  

Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiment with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12 records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life.  

Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have—through their experiments in blackness—generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism.

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers' voices, women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day.

Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors' passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to people for cutting-edge inspired work on this topic for an overlapping committed audience of activists, scholars, and writers. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

Contributors include alba onofrio, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ariel Gore, Arielle Julia Brown, Autumn Brown, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, China Martens, Christy NaMee Eriksen, Claire Barrera, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Esteli Juarez Boyd, Fabielle Georges, Fabiola Sandoval, Gabriela Sandoval, H. Bindy K. Kang, Irene Lara, June Jordan, Karen Su, Katie Kaput, Layne Russell, Lindsey Campbell, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Loretta J. Ross, Mai'a Williams, Malkia A. Cyril, Mamas of Color Rising, Micaela Cadena, Noemi Martinez, Norma A. Marrun, Panquetzani, Rachel Broadwater, Sumayyah Talibah, Tara CC Villaba, Terri Nilliasca, tk karakashian tunchez, Victoria Law, and Vivian Chin.