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Cover of Gedichten en gedachten in het Frans

Risiko Press

Gedichten en gedachten in het Frans

Stéphane Schraenen

€14.00

Written in La Ferme Arpoix (Ceaux-en-Loudun) and Paris, 1998. Dedicated to Guy.

Staple bound, ltd. to 200 copies. Riso-printed on Munken Pure Rough 120gsm by Risiko Press in Borgerhout, covers silkscreened on Eskaboard by Maarten de With, copy editing by Sis Matthé, design by Kaye & Matthé, typeface: Elementa.

[The title of this book is in Dutch, the text is in French]

"Met dank aan Eliane Van De Velde en Marie-Sophie Beinke."

Published in 2021 ┊ 28 pages ┊ Language: French

recommendations

Cover of Comeback Death

Krupskaya Books

Comeback Death

Jennifer Soong

Poetry €21.00

Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling.

"In Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."—Thom Donovan

Cover of Homie

Graywolf Press

Homie

Danez Smith

Poetry €16.00

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”

Cover of Zoë Lund: Poems

Editions Lutanie

Zoë Lund: Poems

Zoë Lund

Poetry €17.00

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

Cover of đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness

Materials

đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness

Nhã Thuyên, Kaitlin Rees

Poetry €13.00

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.

Cover of Black Bedouin

1080 Press

Black Bedouin

Mohammed Zenia, Tenaya Nasser

Poetry €30.00

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse