Femme Ghosts is the result of Mona Kareem’s residency at Poetry International 2019, published in collaboration with Publication Studio Rotterdam. In this series of eight poems, Kareem continues her echoing of women’s voices—the pirate women, busy with their dreams, dwelling on future pasts, indulging in their loneliness. Femme Ghosts is double-direction bound trilingual publication, and includes Kareem’s poetry in Arabic, English and Dutch. 

How do lesbians live in the city, whether they live in the city by themselves or within intentional community? How does the city change what being a lesbian means? Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City explores these questions--and many more.

The issue features creative work by: Srestha Sen, Carina Julig, Roin Morigeau, t pomar, Rita Mookerjee, Margarita Meklina as well as SPORTS -- a selection of work from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, edited by Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom. Plus a great selection of new lesbian writing!

This is the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant’s classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the “way of the world.” Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant’s Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, A Reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes, the Queer City program was a broad collective inquiry into how can we understand the contemporary city through a queer, intersectional, non-normative lens. The program included a series of encounters, dinners, residencies and performances, and Queer City, A Reader reconfigures these moments into a new form, extending the inquiry trans-nationally.

With contributions by Todd Lanier Lester, Shawn Van Sluys, Jota Mombaça, Bruno Mendonça and Nat Cout, João Marcelo and Claudio Bueno, Juliana Santos, Thiago Carrapatoso, Bibi Abigail, Carué Contreiras, Bruno Puccinelli, Vitor Grunvald, Kadija, Regis Mikail, Sabrina Duran, Jean-François Prost, Niki Singleton, Thiago Hersan, Ternura Radical and the Queer Graphics Laboratory. Edited by Júlia Ayerbe and designed by Laura Davinas of Edições Aurora/Publication Studio São Paulo. The English version of this book was published by Publication Studio Guelph. It is available in Portugese from Publication Studio São Paulo. Printed by Publication Studio Rotterdam for rile*.

New Narrative pioneer Kevin Killian's novel, Spreadeagle, has been two decades in the making. Skating nimbly over the vast surface of pop history through a forest of movie stars, pop sensation and dazzling social technologies, Killian undoes the ties that bind a half-dozen Californian men—Daniel Isham, the powerful, popular gay novelist; Kit Kramer, his insecure activist boyfriend; Daniel's father, Ralph Isham, the world-renowned poet who haunts him in death; Eric Avery, the Duchamp-loving twink who wins Kit's heart; and the shadowy Radley brothers, Adam and Gary, who destroy them all. This is the great gay novel that America has been waiting for.

Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers series extends the pioneering work of Paris-based Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion series of the 1950s and 60s, which published work that had been banned or censored through moralistic prohibition. Our series presents great new work that has been effectively 'censored' by the market. In our day, the market is the definitive censor. The Fellow Travelers series proudly presents great work that the market has not endorsed, but that we believe in.

The seventh book in Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers Series, is a love letter between generations of queer people. Set in New York City in 2001, we follow Phillip—a gender subversive drag king in search of grace and magic—through rich, sad, humorous language that is singularly Shelley Marlow's.

Kevin Killian writes, "I've been dying for something first rate and innovative and have found this in Marlow's writing. Her hero, Phillip/Philomena...is the most enchanting and elusive central character in a novel since Cassandra in Dodie Smith's Capture the Castle. While many have compared Marlow to the late Jane Bowles, I would agree if only there was a loving and empathetic Jane Bowles, and now there is and here is her book."

An essay on the forms or purposes of writing, books and libraries. Or as Quinn Latimer wrote: 'There is a relatively well-known workshop at Werkplaats Typografie, the school for design in Arnhem, Netherlands, called 'Best Books'. This past year the school asked the artist Sophie Nys to lead this course. In due time, Nys wrote König and asked if she might bring her students from the workshop to Cologne to discuss his work with books in the space of his own bookstore. She added that since he likely didn’t have enough chairs for all of her students, they would bring their own. König agreed. Then she asked her students to each pick their favorite book. They did so. Then she asked these students to design a chair inspired by that volume. An inspired idea. Strange—and useful. Thus 16 pieces of furniture suggested and elliptically inspired by specific books were built, a kind of living library of booklike creations, as another Walter might put it. The students went to see Herr König, stools in hand, their library entering his. I heard from Sophie in our email correspondence and singular Skype conversation that it was a wonderful visit. I even saw some pictures from that day. After the students returned to Arnhem, and for the final part of the project, they decided to make a publication. This is where I—and the text you are reading now—enter the picture, as they say.'

‘To C.L.S.’, ‘For A.L.M.’, ‘In Memory of J.V.C.’ – Starting from his collection of three-letter dedications, Robin Waart’s new artist book "Dedication(s)" looks at public yet hidden modes of address. While these dedications appear in printed books, they remain private, intimate allusions between author and intended recipient. The project infers the strange position of the reader who encounters these cryptic dedications, which perhaps get in the way of—or better clarify?—the relationship between author and audience. Waart’s project questions the relationship between a work and the reality in which it comes about, and why, and for whom, we make what we make.

2018, book publication, offset and watermark on paper, edition of 800, 26 x 20.3 x 0.65 cm

'Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together. By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.' In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet.

Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina. Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed. Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness. Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play. 

May 2020

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney's daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived briefly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Slow Tongue is the debut writing and poetry collection from Olivia Douglass. A verse-essay/lyric essay hybrid examining race, sexuality and the relationship between Black women artists. 'Slow Tongue' is a response to the writings of M. NourbeSe Philips 'She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks', and works to continue the decolonisation of language and imagery.

Each piece may be taken individually, but it is through looking at their positioning amongst each other that something more comprehensive, provocative and challenging comes together.

Written and designed by Olivia Douglass 
Cover illustration by Jack Tongeman

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.

Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions--what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love.

Sabrina Imber's DYKE (GEOLOGY) is not only gorgeous, it is wildly transformative. It contains sentences that mimic the Earth itself: craggy, pitted, alive. There is so much movement, a momentum that sweeps readers along sentence by sentence. The structures Imbler builds are deeply affecting, deeply moving. The heart of it sits exposed, bare and beating, pulsing and insistent. This writing is very queer, very loving, very painful, very poignant. It is revolutionary work."--Kristen Arnett

"Imbler queers the history of the world here--a thrilling summer romance set to geological time, unlike any I know, spanning the globe and the history of humanity and the space between two dyke hearts. Play in the waves of this mind and emerge renewed."--Alexander Chee

Sabrina Imbler is a half-Chinese writer and dyke based in Brooklyn. She is a staff writer for Atlas Obscura and the recipient of fellowships from Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Asian American Writer's Workshop, and Paragraph NY. Sabrina wrote the monthly "My Life in Sea Creatures" column at Catapult and her essay collection How Far the Light Reaches is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2021.

A Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom are pleased to announce the publication of Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker with a new introduction by poet and scholar Judy Grahn; an afterword by volume editor Julie R. Enszer, with extensive notes on the poems; photographs of Parker and a bibliography.

'In The Complete Works of Pat Parker, we have a trove of her artistic and political engagements-poetry and stories and plays and speeches; these are not separate realities. They intertwine in her now classic works, Movement in Black (1978), Womanslaughter (1978), and Jonestown & Other Madness (1985). But here too are less celebrated and uncollected works, plays especially, that show off Parker’s willingness to experiment, to push us towards more politicized realities.' - Alexis de Veaux

Included in Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker are Parker’s masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as Jonestown & other madness. Parker’s prose writing is collected in The Complete Works along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems. Editor Julie R. Enszer notes, “The breadth of creative output collected here demonstrates the seriousness of Parker’s overall work as a writer. Beginning in 1963, when she was nineteen years old, and continuing until she died in 1989, Parker took her work as a writer seriously. Gathering as much of it as possible into a single volume invites readers to take it seriously as well.”

‘There’s rats and there’s roaches. Anna and her lover live in a shoe store and stroll around Barcelona’s Eixample. One is obsessed with local shopkeepers and the ways rats and roaches gentrify neighborhoods. The other traces the circulation of sand as a commodity around the city.’

'Any space where one can live must be occupied, borrowed or, at last, rented. The shoebox is the home of an animal imprisoned by humans, and a metaphor for precarious housing; that’s why I live in a shoe store. The owners have gone on vacation and to keep the wheel turning, I’ve stayed to spin the coins.'

Co-edited by Yabi, Jupiter Woods and AC/E. ➰➰➰ Silk-screened and printed at Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten. May 2020.

March brings together poems and performance texts by Nathalie Rozanes, as well as a conversation with Elizabeth Ward and Tarek Halaby. 

'Maybe I have never made a performance that was not about identification and its complexity. About positioning oneself. Maybe I have never made a piece that is not about how one thing leads to another. Maybe I have never made a piece that is not about process. (...)' 

Published May 2020.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. 

Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing. 

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and the author of B Jenkins, also published by Duke University Press, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and coauthor of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.

(Dec 2017)

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

In 2015, Jacob finds himself wandering the streets, swamps and cemeteries of New Orleans. Through his search for a man named Ignatius, 'O Fortuna' tells the story of his attempt to make a film. We discover the city’s unique atmosphere and meet a bizarre cast of characters who assist Jacob with his uncertain attempts at shooting scenes of DAT LIKWID LAND.

A pathbreaking new volume of poems from Fred Moten, All That Beauty combine's Moten's penchant for lyrical prosody, radical thought, and African American theory to produce writing unlike any other poetry in the world: "What is it to reside without settling? Is that is or is that ain't like being stuck in sweetness, held in life?"

"The line between Fred Moten’s theory and poetry is increasingly cloudy; the distinction almost seems (but isn’t quite) irrelevant. In All That Beauty, his new poetry collection, the poems come closer than ever before to the capacious, disorienting density of his prose writing: not just for their hairpin turns of speculative reasoning, or even their gleeful embrace of specialized academic terminology, but because they are strewn with names, citations and allusions that situate the text in a range of discourses – from Black studies to sound studies to the philosophy of maths." —Steven Zultanski

(Published 2019.)

The Mausoleum of Lovers comprises Guibert's journals, kept from 1976-1991. Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself -- a mausoleum of lovers -- comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.

HERVÉ GUIBERT (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS. NATHANAËL is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Sisyphus, Outdone. Her translations include books by Édouard Glissant and Danielle Collobert, among others. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

On October 27, 2003, Etel Adnan received a postcard from poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies. Originally in French, the poems it sparked collapse time, then expand it. War and love intertwine with coffee and bombs, memory and the present, evoking life in non- linear time.

Time continues Etel Adnan's recent series of short meditative works on single themes: Sea & Fog, Night, Surge and now Time, expanding her already rich philosophical and poetic lexicon. This book is a collection of six short works originally written in French.

(June 2019)

In Don't Let Them See Me Like This, Jasmine Gibson explores myriad intersectional identities in relation to The State, disease, love, sex, failure, and triumph. Speaking to those who feel disillusioned by both radical and banal spaces and inspired/informed by moments of political crisis: Hurricane Katrina, The Jena Six, the extrajudicial executions of Black people, and the periods of insurgency that erupted in response, this book acts as a synthesis of political life and poetic form.

JASMINE GIBSON is a Philly jawn based in Brooklyn. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire, and freedom. She is the author of the chapbook Drapetomania.

"The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this...coloniality constructs outsides and insides, worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted and navigated - in order to live something like a real self."

Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert. In 1962, Pizarnik published her fourth collection, Diana's Tree, the book that would both change and establish her poetic voice, and it contained the slimmest verses the poet would ever write. It also carried a glowing introduction by Octavio Paz, who by that point served as a prominent Mexican diplomat in Paris and had become a leader of the city's expatriate literary circles. Diana'a Tree, wrote Paz, was a feat of alchemical prowess, a work of precocious linguistic transparency that let off "a luminous heat that could burn, smelt or even vaporize its skeptics."

Rodney Graham's The System of Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to Poe's Last Story is the most ambitious of the textual interventions that contributed to Graham's emergence onto the international art scene in the 1980s. Part 'pataphysical investigation, part Roussellian exercise, the text begins with Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to 'The Domain of Arnheim,'" which describes a waylaid traveller's encounter with an uncannily pristine landscape and cabin in the Hudson River Valley. Into this short tale, which numbers less than twenty pages in most editions, Graham inserts an entire novel centered around an annex to Poe's original structure that houses a fantastical machine. Through a complex set of nested tales, the origins of the machine become clearer but no less magical, and readers will be held rapt by accounts of architectural wonders, a mysterious cipher, and the romance of impossible science.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process. www.timehasfallenasleepintheafternoonsunshine.be

Real-Time Realist is a serial publication of J-LTF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores Ecstasy, Joy, Serenity, and Love, The Yellow Wheel, with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with our own Earth. High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of "the happily reasonable man", Bron Helstrom - an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he - or she - seems.

This issue is dedicated to 'Materializzazione del Linguaggio', a 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Mirella Bentivoglio. The exhibition comprised of work by over eighty women artists working in a huge range of media, but united in their interrogation of text, voice and language. After the smashing hit of their Hervé Guibert No.1 issue, Tinted Window continues its focus on a single subject with issue No.2: Verbivocovisual. In No.2, Tinted Window brings much of this work back to the fore where many artists have slipped into the footnotes of an exciting period in art history. But much beyond our focus on this iconic exhibition, the issue features new essays and art projects by some of the best artists working with text, voice and poetry today. No.2 features new commissions, translations and reprints from: Holly Antrum, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Mirella Bentivoglio, Angela Bianchini, Daniela Cascella, Anne Carson, Paula Claire, Paul Clinton, William Cobbing, Constance DeJong, Karen Di Franco, Sholto Dobie, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Katalin Ladik, Daisy Lafarge, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Silvia Mejía, Hannah Regal, Giovanna Sandri and Sue Tompkins.

Mother Nature is a Lesbian is a type book of poster and prints. The font was made in response to a protest sign used in the New York Chistopher Street Parade in 1974 , in which a sign displaying the handwritten message “Mother Nature is a Lesbian” inspired a typeface created in response to that act of protest. The font derived from the original sign extends the initial moment of protest by expanding this moment of agency past a singular event. It has become the unofficial font for GenderFail and has been used in various programs and publications.

‘In De vulgare eloquentia, Dante developed a poetics of the vernacular – the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street, distributed unilaterally rather than intentionally acquired via a disciplined pedagogy of grammar, and transformed in open bodily exchange, irrespective of social position, gender or rank. “The vernacular,” Dante says, “[is] the language which children gather from those around them when they first begin to articulate words; or more briefly, that which we learn without any rules at all by imitating our nurses.” A vernacular is not structured according to a valuing hierarchy or an administration of history; it is improvised in tandem with the rhythmic needs and movements of a present-tense yet tradition-informed body among other bodies, each specific. There is no general vernacular; it is intrinsically grammarless. Vernacular speech can only ever begin and can never achieve closure. Refusing spatial propriety, it crisscrosses institutions. In Dante’s definition, it is what’s spoken by women and children, thus it is the first, and natural language: “The whole world uses it through its diverse pronunciations and forms”.’ – from Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship. 

Lisa Roberston’s reflection of political subject formation, through poetry and vernacular forms, acts as a critical anchor for the ideas and experiments published in this new series, Dialecty. 

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

TEXTS BY MARLIE MUL, LINDA STUPART AND GEORGIA HORGAN. DESIGN BY MAXIMAGE.

247. Sahar Muradi: A Garden Beyond My Hand
246. Diana Khoi Nguyen: Unless
245. Pamela Sneed: from Black Panther
244. Gail Scott: from Furniture Music
243. Ru (Nina) Puro: I Give You a Feeling, Sweet Jasmine, an Absence
242. Raquel Gutiérrez: There’s a Mother in my Lazy Pompadour