Books

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles—an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. 

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.  

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me(1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.  

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.

Born amidst tragedy and implacable hatreds, the young Peter McCutcheon is denied his freedom, his birthright, and the fruits of his labors by cruel masters, and by a society and history which denies the truth.

THE WAGES is a monument to individual courage and to the ongoing injustices caused by the suppression of memories and the oppression of people. It is also a powerful document of America's entanglement in slavery and vicious myths of race. The wages of sin, according to the Bible, is death. Fanny Howe's novel demonstrates that the wages of hate are pain, and a cost not always borne by the perpetrator, or even the current generation.

Pourquoi faire un fanzine de musique entre filles? Pour contrer l’hypocrisie et la vacuité d’une presse dite «féminine», en réalité capitaliste et aliénante; pour réagir soit à l’insipidité d’une presse culturelle stérilisée par les discours de l’industrie, soit à la morgue de rédacteurs qui confondent authenticité et beaufitude, panache et insulte, et prennent encore la «meuf» pour une catégorie musicale.

Pour se rencontrer physiquement ou virtuellement, soulever des cailloux ensemble, échanger nos habits, éclairer les doutes autant que les évidences, se sentir moins seules. Pour se sortir un peu d’un flux digital qui nous rend malades, s’affranchir des likes, tanguer entre passé et futur (c’est quoi l’«actualité»? ça commence quand, ça finit quand?). Pour ne pas se rouler dans les formules toutes faites ou les bons sentiments, mais bâtir un truc concret, qui muscle la cervelle autant que les bras. Pour essayer de dresser des équations musique—texte—image dans sa tête, puis dans une surface rectangulaire. Et puis déconstruire des mythes, comme celui qu’il y a des gens qui peuvent écrire sur la musique et d’autres pas. Ça veut pas dire qu’on fait n’importe quoi, on se surprend même à redoubler d’une vigilance parfois épuisante: est-ce que je raconte pas trop ma vie? Est-ce qu’on voit que je fais du second degré? Est-ce qu’emploie le bon vocabulaire?

Dans ce 3e numéro de Ventoline, on déterre des reliques d’enfance, des histoires de migrations et de construction identitaire quand on est à la fois blanche et noire; on discute encore et toujours des relations entre le propre et le sale, le design et l’underground, le travail et l’amatorat; on parle de nos exigences et de ce que les autres attendent de nous; et puis parfois, forcément, on parle des relous.

Faute de temps, on n’a pas réussi à vous concocter de mots-croisés pour la plage, mais on vous souhaite quand même une agréable lecture et un été bien moelleux.

Les contributrices :

Miaux / Mia Prce (Anvers)
miaux.bandcamp.com

Hélène Marian (Paris)
https://www.helenemarian.com

Nelly Chevaillier (Paris)
instagram.com/nllchvllr

Anne Vimeux (Marseille)
http://sissi-club.com

Inès Di Folco
instagram.com/inesdifolco
rosemercieband.bandcamp.com
http://www.red-lebanese.com/index.php/music/mi-nina-ep—pira-pora/

Camille Foucou (Marseille)
instagram.com/camillefoucou

Juliette Romero
instagram.com/julietteromeroaaa

Camille Lavaud (Paris / Dordogne)
camillelavaud.com

Hélène Barbier
helenebarbier.bandcamp.com
celluloidlunch.com

Marie-Pierre Bonniol (Berlin)
studiowalter.com
julietippex.com

Victoria Palacios (Bruxelles)
instagram.com/victoriapalacios

Camille Potte (Marseille)
camillepotte.fr

Laetitia Gendre (Bruxelles)
laetitiagendre.com

DJ Marcelle (Amsterdam)
anothernicemess.com

Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of ‘Europe’ and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.

Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist’s own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote ‘European culture’ through art.

With contributions by Reza Negarestani, Laurent Thévenot, Teresa Pullano, Stephen Zepke, Neil Brenner.

Published September 2021

Originally published by Doubleday and Company in 1970, N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix was one of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page.

Praised as a "FREE souled" work by Allen Ginsberg, The Matrix feels as fresh and necessary today as when it was first published. This new facsimile edition, copublished by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, makes the book available to a new generation of readers.

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.  

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with, indeed, our inseparability from others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.  

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture, from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis, is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Originally published in English in 2003, Nicole Brossard's Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body, our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each "crazy" silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.

Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard, recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

A collection of published and unpublished writings of the groundbreaking Chicana writer and self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer and cultural theorist" Gloria Anzaldua.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a visionary writer whose work was recognized with many honors, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Lambda literary award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies. Her book Borderlands/La frontera was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and the Utne Reader. AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crosses the country; a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

"HOT" (Maggie Nelson) - "TIGHT" (Eileen Myles) - "DEEP" (Michelle Tea)

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

"She has fallen forward again, resting there like a reptile basking in the January sun. Where she was, in her corner, temperatures rose up to 28 degrees Celsuis. Her dry skin darkened, drinking the light."

In 2020, CMMC –Céline Mathieu and Myrthe van der Mark– were invited by organisers NICC Lodgers to perform at M HKA in Antwerp in response to art subsidy cuts in Flanders. Their contribution, The Writing Performance, was an attempt to write a novella each in three days, during the museum’s opening hours and in full sight of visitors. Throughout The Writing Performance, CMMC subsisted on water and sugar.

Published 2021.

The book (DE/EN) gathers a selection of five short stories and two poems written between 2018 – 2021 by Benedikt Bock. 

1st edition (400)
Copy editing German original: Frederike Niebuhr (linguistic services)
Translation and Proofreading: Good and Cheap Translators

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l'écriture-au-féminin in Québec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott's ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, "Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment."

With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall and an Afterword by Margaret Christakos.

Gail Scott is the author of Spare Parts (1981), Heroine (1987, re-issued in 2019 with an introduction by Eileen Myles), Main Brides (1993), My Paris (1999), Spare Parts Plus Two (2002), and The Obituary (2010). Her essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs (1989) and in La Théorie, un dimanche (1988) which was translated into English as Theory, A Sunday (2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004). Her translation of Michael Delisle's Le désarroi du matelot was shortlisted for a 2001 Governor General's Literary Award. A memoir, based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years, is forthcoming. Scott lives in Montréal.

Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of "pure seeing" and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.

Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.

"[Love and I] hurries to join a long and illustrious career, which, besides poetry, includes novels, stories, memoir, and short films. . . . Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her poems await illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life." — The New Yorker 

"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted."

She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century-Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé-illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction.

Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating.

Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations.

The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other. Leah D. Hewitt is an associate professor of French at Amherst College.

A reference book containing all the transcripts of Simone Forti's News Animations.

The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti's News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always "danced" the news, it's the way she tells them. But, above all, it's the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities. 

The volume collects Simone Forti's News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.

Introduction by Luca Lo Pinto
Published August 2021

First retrospective monograph: an essential resource for any in-depth critical study of Chiara Fumai's work and thought, including a first systematic analysis of her oeuvre.

This book is dedicated to the complex artistic trajectory of Chiara Fumai, who played a significant role in the development of performance and feminist aesthetics in the twenty-first century and who died prematurely in 2017, at the age of only thirty-nine. Conceived as a critical monograph on Fumai's work as a visual artist, performer, DJ and music curator, Poems I Will Never Release is the first volume to trace the entirety of her artistic path: from her scathing video performances and large-scale installations, to her more intimist practices of automatic writing and collage and her incursions into music.

Almost 500 pages long, the volume is divided into three main chapters. The first of these brings together essays by prominent writers, curators and artists who examine Chiara Fumai's work from various perspectives, highlighting its intersections with anarchism, feminism, ideological forms and discourses of power and oppression, the animal rights movement, theater, surrealism and esotericism. The second chapter presents an imposing iconographic apparatus that documents Chiara Fumai's entire artistic production, from 2007 to 2017, while the third offers an exhaustively detailed chronology and bibliography. 

The book collects essays by Irene Aristizábal, Andrea Bellini, Federico Campagna, Milovan Farronato, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Mara Montanaro, Chus Martínez, Paulina Olowska and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as conversations between Raimundas Malašauskas and Gabriel Lester, and Cristiana Perrella and Marcello Bellan. The chronology and bibliography are edited by Sara de Chiara.

A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.

Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.

This reader is a culmination of direct and tangential deliberations on notions of labour, appreciated across geographies and mediums. Newly commissioned textual manifestations in a multilogue with historical positions.

The reader could be perceived as a negotiation of positions, as the strive towards utterances, towards becoming. Each text could be imagined as a stanza in a song. This is also a strive towards musicality. Or at least a wish for this reader to be a choir, in which we collectively sing, in which we all listen to each other to be able to sing, but most importantly, in which we afford ourselves the privilege of 'hearing the eloquence of silence', 'seeing the inner vision beneath the closed eyes' and 'listening to the chastity of inner music that defies betrayal by the wayward wind.'

Edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Ibrahim Cissé with Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders, Krista Jantowski, Aude Christel Mgba.

Contributions by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Panashe Chigumadzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Danielle Child, Anne Moraa, Philomena Essed, Djuwa Mroivili, Anivia Beylard, Jana Keijdener, Iheb Guermazi, Alia Mossallam, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Simone Atangana Bekono, Lionel Manga, Kodwo Eshun, Amal Alhaag, Precious Colette Kemigisha, Guy Ossito Midiohouan, Akila Richards, Mwazulu Diyabanza, Ibrahim Cissé, Léon-Gontran Damas

Graphic design: Leon Lukas Plum / Werkplaats Typografie.

Published in August 2021
Bilingual edition (English / Dutch)

Accompanying a series of solo collaborations in 2020, this publication offers the first comprehensive and global perspective on Jeremiah Day's work as an artist, performer, researcher and teacher. As it details Day's specific works and evolution between visual and performing arts and between political reflection and engagement the result also serves as sourcebook for the legacy of the intersection between dance and the visual arts of the 1960s and 70's and the models of cultural practice emerging from the work of Hannah Arendt.

In his work, the Berlin-based American artist Jeremiah Day (born 1974 in Plymouth) re-examines recent political struggles and conflicts, revealing their subjective contexts and traces. To do this, he has developed a narrative and choreographic form in which personal and political realities intermingle, thus offering a thoroughly singular vision of these at times forgotten moments of history. 

The distinctive feature of his method lies in a transversal approach. As a student of and regular collaborator with Simone Forti, one of the pioneers of Post-Modern Dance, he has turned performance into a now central and structure-providing practice. Since 2014, Jeremiah Day has in effect presented many performances, which contain movement, improvisation, photography and the spoken word, in order to broach universal historical and political subjects, but within an intimate and incarnated context.