Bewogen selfies

Nasleep neemt de protesten rondom het Gezi Park in 2013 als vertrekpunt en verkent gaandeweg wat er is overgebleven van dit historische moment waarin een andere wereld voor het grijpen leek. Het zijn gedichten die laveren tussen ritmische, conceptuele en kritische noise enerzijds en postrevolutionaire affecten anderzijds, tussen politise­ring enerzijds en onmacht en radeloosheid anderzijds.

In het begin van de jaren 1970, hield Guy Rombouts een notaboekje bij waarin hij alle woorden, bijvoeglijk naamwoorden en werkwoorden bijhield die hij tegenkwam tijdens het lezen en die met elkaar verbonden waren door het voegwoord ‘en‘.

Ongeveer 50 jaar later en met de hulp van de grafische vormgever Jeroen Wille, is de transcriptie van zijn aantekeningen gepubliceerd als een boek dat gelezen kan worden in twee richtingen (en als enige boek coronaproof met twee tegelijkertijd).

Het boek bevat 2158 verzen met in totaal 4316 EN-combinaties.

De kortste verzen met evenveel letters:

A EN Z

4 EN 6

De langste verzen met evenveel letters:

ONUITSPREKELIJKHEDEN EN IMPONDERABILIA

ONEVENWICHTIGHEID EN ZELFOVERSCHATTING

Slangen krioelen in de sarcofaag van het heden, in de krochten van de popcultuur, in de mummie van de natuur, in wondes en rot vlees, in artificiële woestijnen en op geoliede dad bods. Ze wentelen zich rond beursgrafieken, raken verstrengeld met wurgende algoritmes, orkestreren een trage ondergrondse revolutie. Een meisje snijdt zich aan een nepdiamanten piramide en werpt haar slangenvel van zich af.

Dominique De Groen is schrijver en beeldend kunstenaar. Ze publiceerde de dichtbundels Shop Girl (2017), Sticky Drama (2019) en offerlam (2020). Ze werd genomineerd voor de Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee 2018, de Herman de Coninckprijs 2020 en de Fintroliteratuurprijs 2021 en won de Frans Vogel Poëzieprijs 2019 en de Fintropublieksprijs 2021.

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

Nhã Thuyên’s đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness contains eight poems excerpted from the forthcoming book vị nước (taste of water). To read this work is to be wrenched out of oneself and into the opening and closing world of language: a world in equal parts vegetal, liquid, human, stone, at once bordered river and open sea, enclosed maze and open field; a labyrinth, but a labyrinth of the utmost clarity; a rising or collapsing building made of words that’s not a ‘dwelling’ so much as a refusal to dwell, which is its loneliness and bereftness and consolation and strength, all at once. “Steps here pulled forth by some line of poetry out of time”, such work “fabricate[s] a bed out of sea, build[s] a house out of tremendous immensity”. It’s the result of a lifelong investigation of the Vietnamese language, deep, joyous, scrupulous and sometimes painful; of a lifelong investigation of the whole deep field of history and time as it’s lived deep within the person and in the field beyond the personal that poetic language affords us. This is a realm, not of simple freedom, but of the struggle for the fullest record and the fullest measure towards which a poet can strive. Don’t hide the madness. Don’t be at peace. [D.G.]

NHÃ THUYÊN secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and totters between languages. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing) (2008), rìa vực (edge of the abyss) (2011), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), and bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-] vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019). Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is waiting to see the moon. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow, and learning to quietly speak up with care.

KAITLIN REES is a translator, editor, and public school teacher based in New York City. She translates from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên, with whom she co-founded AJAR, the small bilingual journal-press that organizes an occasional poetry festival. Her translations include moon fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019), words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and the forthcoming book of poetry taste of water.

The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time. 

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.

A fullness of the erotic that pervades the entirety of the book to its edges, where a continual corruption of our often unexpressed desires overflows into forms both lyrical and traditional. "Butterflies Come Out At Night" continuously asks where the "you" stands, and if desire can empower one to reach a fullness of self. No othering, but flowing seamless from source to rapid source. The book explores this encompassing and embracing body of care and power through poetry, collage, enchantments, and spells and keeps an aura that constantly shifts where the erotic nature of both writer and reader bloom through out the reading.