Books

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life.

The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination.

The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

For #2 in the ¶ (Pilcrow)-series Romy Day Winkel has approached collecting, or hoarding, as an aesthetic of patience. Through her selection of Wikipedia-articles she looks at what happens when objects, magical or otherwise, are all put together. If it is impossible, and perhaps even uninteresting, to know when a collection or archive is finished, how does one start to hoard impatiently

¶#2 consists solely of texts and images found on the online collaborative platform Wikipedia. ¶#2 is assembled by Romy Day Winkel, designed by Tjobo Kho and Wouter Stroet, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published by OUTLINE.

¶#3 consists of texts and images found on the online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, BIC pen drawings by Kim David Bots and the poem The Mental Traveller by William Blake. ¶#3 is assembled by Kim David Bots, designed by Tjobo Kho, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published in an edition of 150 by OUTLINE in May 2022. 

In what ways have women artists come together to investigate their own image? This publication delves into histories of feminist and queer collective practice, expanding on the various ways women claim agency of their identity, via collaborations that connect intergenerational and far-away friendships. Each chapter features artistic and theoretical case studies that discuss images produced by women artists, about women artists; proposing that to gaze upon someone represented with care and autonomy provides more affirmative ways to relate to ourselves. It discovers that to pay homage to overlooked knowledge of women artists builds a case for the artist as researcher. Only by engaging in both roles can we unveil what is not taught in the mainstream and inspire a more inclusive, generous future.

Each aspect of the book’s design is a collaborative endeavour, expanding the notion of individual authorship. It is with this sentiment that creating the publication became research in itself, via collaboration with both direct peers and an extended genealogy.

“Women Looking at Women Looking at Women” is designed by Marijn van der Leeuw, Esther Vane, India Scrimgeour, Hannah Williams and Annemarie Wadlow.

Annemarie Wadlow (1993, UK) is a research-led artist working between moving image, writing and photography. Her work explores the middle ground between image and imagination, questioning notions of inheritance, personal identity and belonging. She is the co-founder of Nice Flaps, an artist initiative that hosts experimental life drawing sessions.

Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that Anne Juren has developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. Her interest in anatomy and somatic practices grew out of multiple shoulder dislocations. The last dislocation happened in 2014 and, in retrospect, it functioned as a catalyst for this PhD and as one of its main methodologies. With the notion of “anatomies”, the interest sits more in operations on the body, than defining the body itself.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 22, 'Beard. Man. Jug. Rubble. Woman. Vessel', it's part of a sub-series on near invisibility.

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog #14, printed by Colorama on the occasion of ‘Books on Books’ — a week-long event on the topic of publishing and collecting, hosted by Anna Bergquist, Johanna Maierski and Kathrin Schömer. Berlin, August 2017.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 20, ‘Hard Sun’, it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Images in this Catalog were produced by exposure: to the sunlight of Athens, Brussels and Tallinn, and to the heat inside a Berlin apartment, between September 2021 and May 2022. Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Penny in the Fountain’ at VBKÖ, Vienna in July 2022.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 21, ‘Impressed’, it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Dear Friend’ at EKA Gallery, Tallinn in September 2022. This issue of Catalog was produced during a residency period at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, May-August 2022.

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape.

Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community.

By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.

The 9th HOOT pops up for the winter 2022-23, but the conception of this issue started well over a year ago at our beloved Plage Avant (Traduttore, traditore’s studio, Marseille). 

We met Sophie T. Lvoff at many openings and art related events in Marseille these last few years, having a practice that appears mainly as photography, Gufo got curious about all the processes that she uses which involve sound, installation, writing… and more. She welcomed us in her studio of the city of Marseille where she recently settled.

We found out about the “trompe-l’œil” of this iconic checkered table, witnessed the installations of translucid and colored objects evolving on the sunny wall, and looked through her photographic chamber it’s called a large-format camera, but this is funny… For this issue, Sophie suggested to interview another artist, Moyra Davey, who also works in photography and writing, and appeared to have shared experiences too.

The topics of everyday life, intimacy that images embody in both their works, take another dimension as soon as their thoughts, voices and writing expand and express the entirety of their gestures.

This issue is the first interview between two native English-speaking artists, who have ties to the French language from childhood.

The penpals are the main characters of that encounter where we are very welcome to join in their very generous conversations. This is only an excerpt of a long and well referenced correspondence.

Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren’s ongoing artistic research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’. ‘What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?’ As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition, March 2023
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.

"Zupančič writes with rare lucidity and patience for exposition, helped along by a talent for turning peculiar phrases or seemingly senseless jokes into full-blown insights. Her ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory."—Joan Copjec, Brown University

There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles' A ntigone. What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond?  

The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. From this question of violence, the author turns to questions of funerary rites and of the relation of Antigone's singularizing claims to her universal appeal. What, Zupančič asks, does this particular (Oedipal) family's misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, share with the general condition of humanity? This forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?"  

Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič's absorbing guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising account illuminates the play's ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.  

Alenka Zupančič is Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her books include What IS Sex?, The Odd One In: On Comedy, and Ethics of the Real.

A young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Called to twin paths of artistic creation and mystic truth-seeking, they set out on a transcontinental journey. In the Pacific Northwest they meet K, a double agent working between art and technology, who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. This human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.

Allado-McDowell (along with their AI writing partner GPT-3) weave fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics – an air age blueprint. 

Cover art by Somnath Bhatt

When we practice becoming with another’s experience, we practice empathy. When we embody collectiveness, we understand ourselves as a whole and therefore feel no separation. What would it be like to inhabit a body without limits or definition? Which words and meanings make us feel like “non-animals”? The literary genre of xeno fiction proposes an exercise of ethological research and imagination, placing our body inside another’s perspective. This publication convenes writers and non-writers that have experimented with animal embodiment to create literary works and visual interpretations that explore different ways to experience “otherness.” In this volume of the Making Kin series, we focus on non-human animals and hybrid bodies.

Authors: Zoë De Luca Legge, Esther Merinero, Eva Piay, John Kazior, Jorge de la Cruz, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro , Luca E. Lum, Anonymous, Paula Proaño Mesías, Laura Dominguez Valdivieso, Adèle Grégorie, Morgan Wood

The second volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination.

We Know What Remains Unsaid presents research on the mechanisms of invisibilisation of precarious realities and activist knowledges. It investigates what our silences and the unsaid reveal. By giving a voice to several researchers, activists and collectives, this volume records silent words, forgotten stories, invisible struggles and thus makes possible the construction of alternative common narratives.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc and Ramaya Tegegne.

Contributions by Gufo, Tiphanie Blanc, Johana Blanc, L'eau à la Butch, Tiziri Kandi, Noémi Michel, Olga Rozenblum.

Graphic Design: Roxane Maillet.

Elegant in exposition, vast in implication, this groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy compellingly argues the necessity for restoring humanity's lost connections with the sensuous world. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and sleight-of-hand magic, Abram explains how the processes readers think of as "mental" actually derive from a deeply physical interaction with the rest of nature.

In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realitites: `in/tense/in/season'—Rosmarie Waldrop.