Books

A prescient document of art-industry and museum critique from Black artists and writers.

A collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd and first published in 1971, Black Art Notes was a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum, but grew into a "concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists," as Lloyd notes in the introduction.

This facsimile edition features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis & Val Gray Ward. These artists position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, Western frameworks and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays outline the racism of the art world, condemning the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash and neutralize Black art, and offer solutions through self-determination and immediate political reform. While the publication was created to respond to a particular moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making these critiques both timely and urgent.

It goes without saying that a dance is a dance and a book about dance is a book. Though they may meet at the intersection of Art and Good Intentions, I find myself greedy. I have a longstanding infatuation with language, a not-easily assailed conviction that it, above all else, offers a key to clarity. Not that it can replace experience, but rather holds a mirror to our experience, gives us distance when we need it. So here I am, in a sense, trying to 'replace' my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms. But, alas, gone. This has seemed one good reason to compile a book out of the remains of my performances, letting the language fall where it may. Let it be said 'She usually makes performances and has also made a book.' -Yvonne Rainer

Forty-five years after its publication, Primary Information brings Yvonne Rainer's classic book back into print in an exact facsimile.

In 1974, Yvonne Rainer published Work 1961-73, an illustrated catalog of her performance works up to that point. In these years, as the art world turned toward minimalism, Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater colleagues were engaged in a parallel, and equally radical, redefinition of dance. Stripping dance of its pomp and self-serious virtuosity, they created what dancer and choreographer Pat Catterson has called "the people's dance." Or, as Rainer put it, instead of the "overblown plot" of traditional dance, she explored the "obvious" alternative: "stand, walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move and be moved by some thing other than oneself." 

Work 1961-73 chronicles the years when Rainer found herself and her work at the heart of a revolution in dance, performance and art. Written in Rainer's wonderful frank, funny and perceptive prose, and illustrated with photographs, handwritten scores, sketches, press articles and ephemera, Work 1961-73 is a period document and an instruction manual, an archive and a manifesto. 

A sought-after, rare classic, Work 1961-73 is brought back into print in a true facsimile edition by Primary Information; the only change is the small addition of new notes at the back of the book. 

One of the most influential artists of her generation, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater in New York City and a leading figure in the development of minimalist and postmodern dance.

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? 

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.

Winner of Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature; American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book 

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto, unceded Indigenous territory. She is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers and a two-time Lambda Literary nominee. She has published widely, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and (with Wai-Yant Li and Kai Yun Ching) the children's picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea.

Published 2019.

A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies.

This essential reader showcases twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems, selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

The essays include "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "I Am Your Sister," and excerpts from the National Book Award-winning A Burst of Light. The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including National Book Award nominee The Land Where Other People Live. As Gay writes in her astute introduction, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde celebrates "an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last."

A long-awaited facsimile of Michael Snow's legendary artist's book, a classic of conceptualism

For years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception."

In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb's obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives - from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama - the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.

Allison Cobb (she/her) is the author of After We All Died, Plastic: an autobiography, Born2, and Green-Wood. Cobb's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and National Poetry Series; has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa; and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-hosts The Switch reading, art, and performance series and performs in the collaboration Suspended Moment.

Published April 2021

Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark "other" by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

"In poems of brilliant aesthetic diversity and haunting imagery ('Stop bath & rinse, / then hang up this feeling/ by its arms'), Curb illuminates and challenges the boundaries that divide and discipline us."—Evie Shockley, NPR

Divya Victor is the author of Kith, Natural Subjects (Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), Unsub, and Things To Do With Your Mouth. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, BOMB, the New Museum's The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She teaches at Michigan State University.

Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology is the powerful story of a woman's struggle with the contradictory impulses for love and solitude. At the dawn of her adult life, Laure becomes involved in a passionate and all-consuming love affair with her companion, B. But this ultimately leaves her dissatisfied, as she acknowledges her need to establish an identity independent of her relationship with him. Yearning to better understand herself, Laure embarks on a journey of self-discovery, an odyssey that takes her into the territory of her past, into memories and fantasies of childhood, into wildness and witchcraft, into a world where the power of dreams can transcend the legacies of the past and confront the dilemmas of the present. With a poet's attention to the power of language and a keen sense of the dislocation that can occur when the narrative encompasses violence and pornography, as well as the traumas of childhood memory, Kathy Acker here takes another major step toward establishing her vision of a new literary aesthetic. 

In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani shows how your birth chart, a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath, reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Chani makes the wisdom of your birth chart accessible with three foundational keys:

The First Key: Your Sun (Your Life's Purpose)
The Second Key: Your Moon (Your Physical and Emotional Needs)
The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler (Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship)

Chani Nicolas is a Los Angeles-based, Webby award-winning astrologer with a community of over 1 million monthly readers. She has been a counseling astrologer for more than 20 years, guiding people to discover and live out their life's purpose through understanding their birth chart. She has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and on Netflix.

Published February 2021.

For thirty-five years American poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems—"Song of the Andoumboulou" and " Mu—that follow a mysterious, migrant "we" through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy. In a note to this astonishing box set of new work, Mackey writes:

"I turned sixty-five within a couple of months of beginning to write Double Trio and I was within a couple of months of turning seventy-one when I finished it.... It was a period of distress and precarity inside and outside both. During this period, a certain disposition or dispensation came upon me that I would characterize or sum up with the words all day music. It was a period during which I wanted never not to be thinking between poetry and music, poetry and the daily or the everyday, the everyday and the alter-everyday. Philosophically and technically, the work meant to be always pertaining to the relation of parts to one another and of parts to an evolving whole."

Structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane's Meditations — "Love," "Consequence," and "Serenity"— Double Trio stretches the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.

Published April 2021.

What Bungalows Can Tell is the result of extensive artistic and architectural research on the village of Kaliurang (Yogyakarta region, Indonesia). This publication brings together different essays and a series of photographs that critically explore the spatial, transformative effects of globalisation and heritage formation on a local scale. It looks specifically at the colonial bungalows —what can they tell?—  and the stories around them, questioning how they were used in the past, what their function is in the present and what they can represent in the future. In doing so, this publication intends to take into account the colonial history of the village and, at the same time, bring to the fore the voices, stories and local wisdoms often eclipsed by more prominent forms of Western knowledge production.

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive.

This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

Special thanks to Iman Salehian for cover designs.
Thanks also to the Banff Art Centre, February 12-18, 2013.

Johanna Drucker is a writer and book artist known for her work in experimental typography. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to the history of the book, contemporary art, graphic design, and digital aesthetics. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Information Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Drucker wrote this text during residence at the Banff Art Centre, February 12-18, 2013.

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

‘Hotel Bellevue’ is a photo book and a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation. This book is a manifesto for love, anger, the non-human, a wish to connect, to suggest, and to study. Only things from the heart deliver.

Published 2021. 

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).

Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time." 

This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.

Published 2021. 

It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.

Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une 
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non 
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.

Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen zien.

Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue, creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.

Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.

These visionary tales span genres like sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism, but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.

Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose", a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http: //fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sheena Patel, and Sunnah Khan are four writers that make up the talented collective '4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE' and bring their radical, polyphonic performance style to bear on a series of individual pamphlets that still resonate with their collaborative force. Each author's discreet publication is a stand-alone work, published as a set of poetry and prose pamphlets, highlighting the daring, brilliant writing that characterises both the group and each individual author.

“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle. Well, I do not put my personal self into my poems. But my personal self [Hilda Doolittle] has got between me and my real self, my real artist personality [H.D.]. And in order to clear the ground, I have tried to write things down––in order to think straight, I have endeavored to write straight. But I hope to come clear and then turn to my real work again. You must remember that writing poetry requires a clarity, a clairvoyance almost. I have been too weak to dare to be clairvoyant. I have tried instead to be merely sensible. I mean in the common sense of that word. In the long run, the clairvoyance is the only sanity for me. But in the novel I am working through a wood, a tangle of bushes and bracken out to a clearing, where I may see clear again.”

H.D., letter to John Cournos, July 9th 1918 (?), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSSA24, Box 17, Folder 582 (emphases added). The penultimate word was crossed out by H.D. herself.

This edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest was produced for THE GREEN MAN (Lucy Skaer with Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer, Hanneline Visnes); with a sole distribution point – in direct relation to the work of Lucy Skaer – of 500 free* copies, at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, from 26 July to 6 October 2018.

Typeset by Will Holder, using Apple’s Enhanced Dictation, reading Palimpsest, Houghton Miflin, 1926. (Letterpress by Henri Darantiere, Paris, for Contact Editions)

Copy-edited by Rosa Aiello reading Palimpsest, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. (Linotype)

This third edition reproduces the punctuation of the 1926 French typesetting of English text. Certain spellings are maintained with due consideration for an American writer living in 1920s London. Additional suggestions to spelling are inserted between square brackets.

The cover uses a stencil with parts taken from the geometric construction of Roman capitalis quadrata, inherited from the classical Greek alphabet.

This production would not have been realised without Rosa Aiello, Stuart Fallon, Tessa Giblin, Bitsy Knox, Emmie McLuskey, Tiina Poldaru, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Wait.

Palimpsest: Copyright © 1926 by H.D.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Sitzen ist das neue rauchen is a publication released on the occasion of the exhibition 'Sitzen ist das neue rauchen' by Sophie Nys.

The publication contains unspectacular and sometimes very similar views of Haim Steinbach’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2014. The pictures don’t look like regular exhibition views but are taken from the seated position of the guard who shows the exanimated spaces.