Avowed

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians; Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience, which won the 2017 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; and a monograph of ink drawings, Prose Architectures. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Death Book is dedicated to Bruce LaBruce’s archive of rarely published or previously unpublished work characterized by morbid fascinations. Here photographs challenge the viewer to explore what lies beneath the veneer of Western society.

The book brings this body of work together for the first time, combining LaBruce’s performances, actions, film production stills and photography that explicitly outline his obsessions, with never-before exhibited archival works from projects including Hustler White, Otto; or Up with Dead People, and L.A. Zombie.

The book is edited as loosely connected vignettes, characterised by horror, the carnage accelerated rather than overcome, questioning existing values, hierarchies, and perceptions of good and evil. A variety of faces and body parts appear, including those of actors Francois Sagat and Tiger Tyson, model/actor Tony Ward, artists Kembra Pfahler and Slava Mogutin, and cameos by legendary figures such as performance artist Ron Athey, musician/artists Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, artist Dash Snow, actor Brad Renfro, Asia Argento and Bruce LaBruce himself.

The Death Book also introduces the art director Max Siedentopf, who has designed the book as a paraphrase of the Bible, punctured with three bullet holes, piercing the book from front to back. The book contains an introduction by artist, photographer and writer Slava Mogutin.

A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose.

This book follows the first exhibition of Robilliard’s notebooks, ‘Disorganised Writings and Sketches’ with Rob Tufnell in Cologne in April 2019. It was made with support from the Elephant Trust and the book’s designers, A Practice for Everyday Life and with assistance from James Birch, one of David’s gallerists, and Chris Hall, custodian of the estate of Andrew Heard. The book is dedicated to Andrew Heard.

Rob Tufnell presents a new publication of extracts from the notebooks of the poet and artist David Robilliard (b.1952 – d.1988). After his premature death from an AIDS-related illness in 1988, Robilliard left a large number of notebooks in the care of his close friend and fellow artist Andrew Heard. These were obsessively filled with drafts of poems, diary entries, addresses and telephone numbers, blunt observations, quiet reflections, short stories, ideas for paintings, portraits and crude drawings. Robilliard’s superficially simple, pithy prose and verse is riddled with the dichotomies of an era that was both exuberant and miserable. His notebooks reveal his creative process, his interests, ideas, ambitions and then his illness but always embody his often repeated belief that ‘Life’s not good it’s excellent.’ 

Many of the books contain the inscription: ‘If found please return to 12 Fournier Street, London E1. Thank you’ – the home and studio of his patrons, Gilbert & George. In their lament ‘Our David’ (1990) they describe their protégé as: 

“...the sweetest, kindest, most infuriating, artistic, foul-mouthed, witty, sexy, charming, handsome, thoughtful, unhappy, loving and friendly person we ever met... Starting with pockets filled with disorganised writings and sketches, he went on to produce highly original poetry, drawings and paintings.”

The publication exists in two editions: yellow and pink.