A Talk on Rhyme

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk given by the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the early 1980s, in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on intensive literary and musical studies, and shaped by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy, Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.”

The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.

Edited and translated by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Phil Baber.

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

The Chroma Series lists elements of reality and systematically changes their color to evoke monochrome universes. The resulting poems may be conceived as mental films where quick-change art coexists with nonsense and politics.

‘May my story be beautiful and unwind like a long thread . . .’, she recites as she begins her story. 

The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on – not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’

In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’. 

The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.

"Para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology for arts institutions.
What can established art institutions learn from small-scale organizations' approaches to invitation, hosting, and publicness? In Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape, Paul O'Neill explores how new forms of invitation can reimagine host–guest relations and open escape routes from fixed institutional roles. Moving between speculation, critique, and proposition, the essay introduces "para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology of generosity and self-organization without absorption. For O'Neill, para-hosting is a form of escape that enables transformative possibilities beyond existing power structures within institutions and otherwise.

In the early 2010s, the idea of "the curatorial" arose after a short but intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The books in the On the Curatorial series look at the consequences of that discussion today and ask: Do we need different curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises? The series allows earlier participants in the debate to reflect on how their concepts and practices have changed, while younger generations of curators explore the ongoing need for new conceptual approaches to curation.
The series is edited by Carolina Rito, who is professor of creative practice research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK, and executive editor of Contemporary Journal.

Paul O'Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, since 2017.

Edited by Carolina Rito.
Contribution by Gerrie van Noord.