Sonnet(s)

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic. These are conjuring poems; poems coming after collaboration—entanglement as conceit, as kink, as communion pleasure tactic. Smuggle in a sexy mirror, smuggle in a double-headed dildo, smuggle in a sentence then feel it read back: the author is reader is author is reader.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

The “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press, that federated visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement from 1971 to 1976.

The independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists' couple Martha Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children, they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside, where, joined by a group of friends including the artist and art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed 'a community of duplicators, printers, and artisans'.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition artists' books, it published the work of its own members, but also that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing to distribution, under the same—bucolic—roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of its generation.

Published by the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, this reference book surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the publications of its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, David Mayor and Chris Welch, and of the numerous visitors to its rural outpost from 1971 to 1976. A “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by BGP, it is complemented by critical essays and first-hand texts that explore the working methods (economy and autonomy of production, distribution of books via post) and document the international influence of this short-lived “community of duplicators, printers, and artisans”.

Essays by Karen Di Franco, Zanna Gilbert, Polly Gregson, Carmen Juliá, Alice Motard, Mila Waldeck ; original texts by Allen Fisher, Mike Leggett, Clive Phillpot, Cecilia Vicuña.

Editions by Claudio Bertoni, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, GJ de Rook, Felipe Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Yaël Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Ken Friedman, Mick Gibbs, Klaus Groh, Kristján Guðmundsson, Mary Harding, Woody Haut, Jan Hendrix, Jarosław Kozłowski, Myra Landau, Michael Leggett, Rafael López, Raúl Marroquin, Pepe Maya, David Mayor, Anthony McCall, Victor Musgrave, Opal L. Nations, Colin Naylor, Michael Nyman, Ryo & Hiroko Koike, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Sitting Dog & Co, Endre Tót, Yukio Tsuchiya, Ben Vautier, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Welch, Hideki Yoshida...

Each book is accompanied by five unprecedented bookmarks.

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels and Vancouver. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Le Chauffage brings together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities with the  intent to spark discussion and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form. 

Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. And since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, it is always unclear who is really transforming who?

Contributions by: Bob Cain & Linda Miller, Moyra Davey, Laurie Kang, Niklas Taleb, Madeleine Paré & Diane Severin Nguyen, Josephine Pryde, Slow Reading Club, Ken Lum, Isaac Thomas, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Artun Alaska Arasli & Graeme Wahn, Stephen Waddell, Maya Beaudry & Chloe Chignell, Lisa Robertson, groana melendez, Victoria Antoinette Megens and Will Holder.

Editors: Emile Rubino and Felix Rapp
Co-Editor: Francesca Percival
Design: Francesca Percival and Felix Rapp
Cover Design: Francesca Percival
Printed by: Cassochrome, Belgium
Edition of 350

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.