Books

A collection of poems from their book Post Meridian.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

Collected poems by Heather Christle.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

"A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry."

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

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

A vernacular debut that uncompromisingly journeys towards its sole destination: the decolonization of the imagination. 

In Invasive species, Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees—the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.

Bruce Boone Dismembered collects nearly five decades of writing by Bruce Boone, a founder of New Narrative and critical figure at the crossroads of late-twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. At once sexy and political, gossipy and scholarly, this crucial volume includes poems, stories, essays, interviews, and reviews.

In a time of disorder and disease, Boone’s body of work acts as a mirror to our dismembered global reality. This scavenged, collaged, taped-together collection provides a “map to negotiate perils” and guides us toward reconciliation with perilous futures. This book exemplifies the poignancy that might emerge from the found and frenetic.

The title of publication series ‘Agathe Bauer’ stands for a broadly misheard hook “I’ve got the power” from a German 1990 Eurodance hit ‘The Power’ by the band Snap! The hook that turned the song into a hit, came from Jocelyn Brown’s track ‘Love's Gonna Get You’, but neither her name nor the track appears in the credits. And, here is where Agathe Bauer comes in - a mysterious being who acquires agency through the homophonic misinterpretation of the main hook “I’ve got the power”.

In ‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ Agathe has an agenda. Nothing could be as it would have been, but she is here to trace the sources of how it has become. Agathe Bauer is here to analyze the capacity of misinterpretation to unveil asymmetric power structures in knowledge systems and by tuning into the social-political, cultural and aesthetic dimension of it.

‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ features contributions by: Gabriela Acha, [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], Lynn Hershman Leeson, Romy Kießling, Markues, Luzie Meyer, Maru Mushtrieva, Claudia Pagès, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Miriam Stoney, Christine Sun Kim, Eric Winkler, Miriam Yammad, Anna Zett.

Conceptualized and edited by Gabriela Acha, Romy Kießling, Maru Mushtrieva.
Designed by Timur Akhmetov.

In this debut collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. They are the author of Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Their poem "For a Burial Free of Sharks" won the 2016 Gigantic Sequins poetry contest judged by Lucas De Lima. Xandria is the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press, and a teaching artist for Winter Tangerine's NYC workshops. Their work is featured or forthcoming from Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, West Branch, and elsewhere.

In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani shows how your birth chart—a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath—reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Chani makes the wisdom of your birth chart accessible with three foundational keys:

• The First Key: Your Sun (Your Life's Purpose)
• The Second Key: Your Moon (Your Physical and Emotional Needs)
• The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler (Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship)

Astrology is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. In a world in which we are taught to look outside of ourselves for validation, You Were Born for This brings us inward to commit to ourselves and our life's purpose.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

A guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page "Me" to the sprawling 70-page "Summer 80," there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups - first published in 2001 and recipient of the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry— was immediately a controversial and celebrated work. Using the "cut-up" method of William S. Burroughs, Cunt-Ups is a work of sex magick, based on source texts from old lovers and Jeffery Dahmer transcriptions. The resulting spell queers everything around it.

Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art's On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist's writing and lifework. Have a look at her collection When the Sick Rule the World, from Semiotext(e). Her essay, "The Beating of Our Hearts," was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian she edited for Nightboat Books WRITERS WHO LOVE TOO MUCH: NEW NARRATIVE 1977-1997.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.

The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.

This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates mysteries of fandom and obsession, and has created an exuberant work of personal meditation and cultural history.

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard.

In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Kiepja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time while intimately interrogating the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the poet and the world, and the link between author and art. Inviting the reader to engage with the resonant meanings of the withheld, Brand offers a profound and moving philosophy of writing and a wide-ranging analysis of the present world.

Femme Ghosts is the result of Mona Kareem’s residency at Poetry International 2019, published in collaboration with Publication Studio Rotterdam. In this series of eight poems, Kareem continues her echoing of women’s voices—the pirate women, busy with their dreams, dwelling on future pasts, indulging in their loneliness. Femme Ghosts is double-direction bound trilingual publication, and includes Kareem’s poetry in Arabic, English and Dutch. 

How do lesbians live in the city, whether they live in the city by themselves or within intentional community? How does the city change what being a lesbian means? Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City explores these questions—and many more.

The issue features creative work by: Srestha Sen, Carina Julig, Roin Morigeau, t pomar, Rita Mookerjee, Margarita Meklina as well as SPORTS — a selection of work from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, edited by Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom. Plus a great selection of new lesbian writing!

This is the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant’s classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the “way of the world.” Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant’s Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, A Reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes, the Queer City program was a broad collective inquiry into how can we understand the contemporary city through a queer, intersectional, non-normative lens. The program included a series of encounters, dinners, residencies and performances, and Queer City, A Reader reconfigures these moments into a new form, extending the inquiry trans-nationally.

With contributions by Todd Lanier Lester, Shawn Van Sluys, Jota Mombaça, Bruno Mendonça and Nat Cout, João Marcelo and Claudio Bueno, Juliana Santos, Thiago Carrapatoso, Bibi Abigail, Carué Contreiras, Bruno Puccinelli, Vitor Grunvald, Kadija, Regis Mikail, Sabrina Duran, Jean-François Prost, Niki Singleton, Thiago Hersan, Ternura Radical and the Queer Graphics Laboratory. Edited by Júlia Ayerbe and designed by Laura Davinas of Edições Aurora/Publication Studio São Paulo. The English version of this book was published by Publication Studio Guelph. It is available in Portugese from Publication Studio São Paulo. Printed by Publication Studio Rotterdam for rile*.

New Narrative pioneer Kevin Killian's novel, Spreadeagle, has been two decades in the making. Skating nimbly over the vast surface of pop history through a forest of movie stars, pop sensation and dazzling social technologies, Killian undoes the ties that bind a half-dozen Californian men—Daniel Isham, the powerful, popular gay novelist; Kit Kramer, his insecure activist boyfriend; Daniel's father, Ralph Isham, the world-renowned poet who haunts him in death; Eric Avery, the Duchamp-loving twink who wins Kit's heart; and the shadowy Radley brothers, Adam and Gary, who destroy them all. This is the great gay novel that America has been waiting for.

Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers series extends the pioneering work of Paris-based Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion series of the 1950s and 60s, which published work that had been banned or censored through moralistic prohibition. Our series presents great new work that has been effectively 'censored' by the market. In our day, the market is the definitive censor. The Fellow Travelers series proudly presents great work that the market has not endorsed, but that we believe in.

The seventh book in Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers Series, is a love letter between generations of queer people. Set in New York City in 2001, we follow Phillip—a gender subversive drag king in search of grace and magic—through rich, sad, humorous language that is singularly Shelley Marlow's.

Kevin Killian writes, "I've been dying for something first rate and innovative and have found this in Marlow's writing. Her hero, Phillip/Philomena...is the most enchanting and elusive central character in a novel since Cassandra in Dodie Smith's Capture the Castle. While many have compared Marlow to the late Jane Bowles, I would agree if only there was a loving and empathetic Jane Bowles, and now there is and here is her book."

An essay on the forms or purposes of writing, books and libraries. Or as Quinn Latimer wrote: 'There is a relatively well-known workshop at Werkplaats Typografie, the school for design in Arnhem, Netherlands, called 'Best Books'. This past year the school asked the artist Sophie Nys to lead this course. In due time, Nys wrote König and asked if she might bring her students from the workshop to Cologne to discuss his work with books in the space of his own bookstore. She added that since he likely didn’t have enough chairs for all of her students, they would bring their own. König agreed. Then she asked her students to each pick their favorite book. They did so. Then she asked these students to design a chair inspired by that volume. An inspired idea. Strange—and useful. Thus 16 pieces of furniture suggested and elliptically inspired by specific books were built, a kind of living library of booklike creations, as another Walter might put it. The students went to see Herr König, stools in hand, their library entering his. I heard from Sophie in our email correspondence and singular Skype conversation that it was a wonderful visit. I even saw some pictures from that day. After the students returned to Arnhem, and for the final part of the project, they decided to make a publication. This is where I—and the text you are reading now—enter the picture, as they say.'

‘To C.L.S.’, ‘For A.L.M.’, ‘In Memory of J.V.C.’ – Starting from his collection of three-letter dedications, Robin Waart’s new artist book "Dedication(s)" looks at public yet hidden modes of address. While these dedications appear in printed books, they remain private, intimate allusions between author and intended recipient. The project infers the strange position of the reader who encounters these cryptic dedications, which perhaps get in the way of—or better clarify?—the relationship between author and audience. Waart’s project questions the relationship between a work and the reality in which it comes about, and why, and for whom, we make what we make.

2018, book publication, offset and watermark on paper, edition of 800, 26 x 20.3 x 0.65 cm

'Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together. By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.' In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet.

Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina. Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed. Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness. Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play. 

May 2020