Books

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

For me this book is a bag... Like any single-use carrier bag – I disapprove. It shouldn’t exist, it contributes to pollution, it should be banned... And yet, in spite of the fact I know this book may be a waste product... I’m still writing, redacting, expanding... I’m still waiting, wasting, wanting. According to Ursula, ‘It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag.' – Sophia Al-Maria

They recite all the stories of the world in a loud voice. When they're done, all the stories, all time and all places will have passed through their lips...’ With the minimum of instructions and a restricted format of four lines, Dora García’s collaborative and participatory project has now collected over 2,500 stories. Ranging from mundane to the extraordinary, these four line vignettes reveal the shared fears and fantasies of the contributors, the pervasiveness of popular culture and the possibilities of the imagination.

Developed over the past year and a half, Cesura//Acceso Issue 2 contains new writing by Paul Abbott, Hannah Black, Nathaniel Mackey, Larne Abse Gogarty, Verity Spott, Irene Revell with Annea Lockwood, Paul Rekret, and Federica Frabetti with Mark Fell.

Issue 2, in response to the open call Corrupting Desires! Technique, Performance, and Control Cesura present a series of texts which deal with the problems of constraint, restraint and domination in relation to musical production, performance and reception. With contributions from Abject Subject Ensemble (Mattin, Farahnaz Hatam, Sacha Kahir, and Colin Hacklander), Naroder Bourniki, ESW, Danny Hayward, Sophie Hoyle, Sacha Kahir, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Claire Potter, Byron Peters and Tyler Coburn, David Morris and Kim O'Neil.

Cesura was formed in 2014 as a place to think through the politics of music. The first issue was published in 2014. They have since held workshops, talks, radio shows, and put on gigs exploring the politics of music, poetry and performance.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

A set of generative texts following the genetic sequencing of DNA as the underlying structure or score for its characters.

Graphic design by Gerard Herman

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2010) and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, due to be published in 2012. Exercise in Pathetic Criticism is the first in a projected series of experiments in literary criticism.

Being Together Precedes Being offers a text book for the project “The Kids Want Communism,” which was initiated towards the 99th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution of October 1917 as a series of exhibitions, symposiums and conferences, screening programs, publications and a summer camp. In this textbook, communism does not merely describe an “us versus them” relation, but also offers that we are becoming the future. This trajectory of communism runs parallel to us at every single moment and its guiding principle is that being together precedes being.

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa. It enables thinking a politics of decolonisation for agriculture, migration, care, soil and the archive.

Recipes for you: A vegan and gluten free recipe and story book with additional life skills is a new cookbook and survival guide by artist Holly White. Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories.

The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in The Men.

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

THE APOTHECARY stems from the author's desire to remake the sentence—to let it be capacious, preposterous, convivial, and hang it from a pronoun worn like a phantom limb. Robertson wants that ghostly pronoun to reinvent itself afresh in each sentence. Looking towards the eighteenth century, sometimes through a lens occasionally borrowed from contemporary sources, the text of THE APOTHECARY is precise, intoxicating materia medica dispensed by one of Canada's most important contemporary posts at the beginning of her career with the use of florid instruments.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XECLOGUE is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work.

Ladies wear the blue is a collection of watercolour drawings by the hand of Melissa Mabesoone and Oshin Albrecht. The blue watercolours portray women from different moments in time. The adjacent texts describe these women's existence, roles, desires or ideosyncrasies deriving from the 'blue' in their lives. From the first female police officers and Alices all around, to Courtney Love's blue baby dolls and the girl with the blue tattoo Olive Oatman, this publication is an ode to women venturing into the world, and a way to continue telling their herstories.

{ENTHUSIASM} is the 7th poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler. It follows highly-acclaimed collections including The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner and Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler. The book's 81 poems are intended as individual pieces in their own right, but are interlinked by subjects including battle and violence, infants and infancy, religion, economy and population, the self, modernity, and the past.

Early Tuumba Press from 1977.

Early Tuumba Press from 1982

SCATTER MATRIX unfolds like a map, grid tracing multiple possibilites of language and form. Here is a scale, and a sense of time, where the score offers discrete signatures: 3 and 4 line measures upon which words balance or pivot forward. The result is a cumulation, a sense of connection along the diagonal, spins and collisions, slow fades and vaporous dissolves. Abigail Child's work invites productive inquiry and rewards readerly attention, to (the means of) the production of meaning, a late 20th century witness—Erica Hunt.

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.