Books

Lacan's Critique of Understanding and the Problem of Meaning.

Adrian Piper's Transformation of Minimalism.

In a single seventeen-page paragraph, Jill Johnston describes an odyssey in and out of a not-yet-described identity in this excerpt from her 1973 bestseller, "Lesbian Nation".

In this premiere essay, meditations on writing form a mini-antologica. The work of Piera Aulagnier is linked to that of Sade. A focus is cast on the artist Filippo de Pisis. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.

Lavskrift is an edition written using signs collected from script lichen (graphis scripta). The species grows in shady deciduous forest and has small, black structures that resemble writing characters.

In the book Stahle explores asemic writing: writing where the signs have no reference to a known sound or meaning.

Edition: 300 numbered copies
Printed in Sweden by ByWind
Letterpress printed cover
Open spine binding with black thread

Meriem Bennani's Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.

This volume includes essays by Emily LaBarge and Elvia Wilk and transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and: Omar Berrada; Fatima Al Quadiri, Negar Azimi, and Tiffany Malakooti; Amal Benzekri; and Aziz Bouyabrine.

This book brings together the Palabrarmas series by the artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile). A neologism that translates to “word weapons” or “word arms,” Palabrarmas imagine new ways of seeing language. By taking the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cut-outs, mixed media installations, and street actions, Vicuña brings together many aspects of her practice in poetry, activism, and visual art, allowing new meanings to emerge. This book presents a range of palabrarmas, created over the past four decades, in color for the first time.  

Cecilia Vicuña is an artist, poet and activist currently based between New York and Santiago.

The People’s Fadai (literally, “self-sacrificers”) were a prominent Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization in Iran. The Fadai emerged in the 1960s from a diffuse movement advocating for armed struggle, in response to the monarchic regime’s increasingly violent crackdowns against all forms of dissent. Many of these original guerrilla groups were dismantled by the secret police, known as the SAVAK, before they had the chance to launch any actual militant actions.

This zine examines a selection of texts influential to or produced by the Fadai. Gradually, their period of study produced original theoretical works that would inform the guerrilla resistance in Iran. Over the course of a decade and a half, these works culminated in the radical newspaper Kar, which is still in publication today. Despite decades of militant leftist publishing and revolutionary movement, Iranian communist thought remains removed from much of the wider Marxist canon.

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

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 v. Gilbert – the only extant public document related to the massacre of those 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.

Fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author and contributions by Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman.

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.

When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often surprised by grief in the oddest corners, the poet takes us through rooms, routines, and rituals of bereavement, the memory of love, a shared life and separation. A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints, Stephenson has written a remarkable first book, moving and, despite everything, a hopeful record of a gay relationship. It is also a landmark elegy collection.

Paul Stephenson studied modern languages and linguistics. He has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). In 2013/14 he took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and the Aldeburgh Eight, before completing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with the Manchester Writing School. In 2018 he co-edited the ‘Europe’ issue of Magma (70) and currently co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. He is a university teacher and researcher, and lives between Cambridge and Brussels.

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.

For the narrator of Motion Sickness life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova.

In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

"The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat".

In his second book of poems, Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. This collection blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence.

The poems of Border Wisdom break and mourn physical borders at the same time. Here the exilic idea of a return to a home is expressed in the daily return to the blank page in search of a poem. In these returns the body brushes against the past and, as Hart Crane puts it, taps into "that memory all things nurse."

"In Border Wisdom, Ahmad Almallah takes the notable step of writing in a mix of Arabic and English scripts, a bilingual poetics that has surfaced intermittently among the finest of our experimental writers. For this and for his exemplary writings in standalone English, I would extend to him the well-known welcome that Emerson directed to Whitman nearly two centuries ago: I greet you at the beginning of a great career."—Jerome Rothenberg

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press in 2019. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his sequence of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

no more poetry presents drone, the debut collection from poet felix garner-davis. the book is simple, in that it directs us where to look. high up in the apartment of words the poet offers the audience a window, from which the abundance, beauty, pain and peculiarity of the world can be observed. the poet boldly enacts the role of surveyor, of witness and of voyeur, and asks that we follow suit.  

the poems offer new perspectives for which to frame the mechanical and the natural, the quiet and the dizzying. with precision and generosity garner-davis offers an inquisitive consideration of people and their many strange performances within time. the poet asks the audience to join him as the grounded witness; to pause and breath, and in turn celebrate one’s hereness. the poem sings of our aliveness! garner-davis places the reader firmly by his feet, neck tilted against the glass pane of the building or the taxi-cab or the train or the motorcar. thrust into the streets that carry the great disconnect of living; of lives separated and alien, and yet so proximal to our own. this is a book of city poems, guided by the poet, whom we may also call the drone. this is a book that collects many small songs of the everyday and asks us to sing them. drone is a celebration of moments and their endurance

felix is a writer, spoken-word artist & architecture student. he lives in naarm & co-edits the literary journal malevolent soap.

nmp.07: 
2021, english — metallic paperback
164 pages — 108 x 178 mm
first edition, edition of 200 (numbered)

This book emerged out of a collaborative writing project that began in 2020 in response to The 3:15 Experiment. The ‘experiment’ involved a group of poets who, every August, would write nightly at 3:15am from wherever they were. It began in 1993 with six poets (Bernadette Mayer, Danika Dinsmore, Jen Hofer, Kathleen Large, Lee Ann Brown, and Myshel Prasad) at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University, Colorado), then continued every August for 22 years, with the group growing to over 25 poets, participating from various time-zones. Four of the initial poets—Mayer, Dinsmore, Hofer, and Brown—compiled The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001), a selection of their middle-of-the-night writings between 1993-2000.

This edition builds further on this practice.

"We started thinking about a reading and writing practice that is shared but still divisible, divisible but not subtractable. The structures created by synchronicity, repetition, and temporal constraint felt generative. We found that these structures produced the conditions for another logic to emerge, a night-time logic. This night-time logic gestured to a different kind of self perhaps, a self somewhere between a waking-I and a sleeping-I, a self emerged through habit. After all, logic is just a habit.

This nightly rhythm has now become a yearly ritual: every October we’ve returned to this shared practice. As Jen Hofer says, it’s just “to see what is there. Merely what is there, merely to see.”(2) The poems in this book have been compiled from our first batch of 1:53’s. We edited them ‘together-together’—together trying to attune to each poem’s internal logic, while also trying to locate a collective voice that (we hope) textures throughout.

(Certainly) any writing idea of Bernadette’s is one worth pursuing. This book is dedicated to Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), and the certainty of possibility her work opens up to us."

on nmp.16: 
english, chicago screw, folio cover, 148 x 210 mm
first edition, edition of 115 (numbered).

Enter into Jessica Rose Pearson’s debut poetry collection Yearning At The Opera Bar:

The curtain opens on a girl or girl-like thing, early 20’s, laying on the floor of her studio apartment, masturbating, listening to Mass B Minor, BWV 232 “Hohe Messe”: No. 4 Chorus: Et incarnatus est…play it

The next 52 pages descend into the exact document of sex, love and living that you could hope for. The book arrives sharp and stays unrelentingly funny until the very end. What is so special about Pearson’s humour is that it cuts in a way that, while buoyant and playful, reveals something of deep philosophical intrigue. The poetry is determined in its delicate exploration of interpersonal minutiae. Pearson is deeply attuned to both touch and colour and their potential to evoke and seduce the reader. The poetry is concise, considerate and intelligent.

Pearson will define love many times throughout this collection; a pizza hut pamphlet, a green apple, car sex, hourly spoonfuls of yoghurt, stanley tucci. Strangely, what love is doesn’t seem to be what is most important in these poems. What is important is that we get to watch this exploration and in turn witness the many forms desire takes. Indeed we are given a document on love’s mesmerising temporality and strange unpredictable movement. This book is a brilliant survey of attraction’s mysteries.

"…a book about days and pleasure. the dizzying inaction of life’s excess. it’s an interrogation on the balance of the circle time brings. they are mostly automatic poems. the book feels to be the beginning of a dialogue/catalogue of spirit, in as much as the poems enact a pantheism in their noticing of the body of/as earth. a long ode to witnessing the patterns we lay in avoidance of suffering. it examines a philosophy of patient indifference. and so much else i can’t say, because i’ve spent too long trying to say it. life as the grand poem."—daniel ward reflects on eternal delight paralysis.

nmp.12: 
2022, english —  paperback 
148 pages, 145 x 204 mm
first edition, edition of 200, numbered

How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State offers a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew engagement with democratic theorizing, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. His first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), won the Charles E. Smith Award for best book in European History from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Huneke has written for Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.