Basic Mechanics

13 poems of various length.

"I have used a procedure to write them and I am happy to share it, but it isn't what's most important about these poems. The subject matter that, I eventually realised, they share to the extent of justifying bundling them up in one pamphlet is religiosity, what stands between belief and act, be it faith or trust."

Referring to Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of 'wild tongue' (Borderlands/ La Frontera, 1987), the publication departs from the questions: How to tame a wild tongue? How to carry language? The verbs 'taming' and 'carrying' imply certain dynamics of permission and restriction of movement, and suggest the entanglement between language and the body. The project delves into the notion  of 'tonuge' as an archive: the 'tongue' as a muscle shaped by the physical practice of moving/ talking, having memory; the 'tongue' as a 'cultured' part of the body. It addresses accent as part of our linguistic identity, but also something that defines access or restriction. (From Monika Charkowska's preface to the publication)

Artists: Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Curated by: Monika Charkowska

Texts by: Monika Charkowska, Claire Goodall, Kübra Gümüsay, Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Edited by: Monika Charkowska

Translations: Epp Aareleid (ENG to EST), Ksenia Krimer (ENG to RUS), Keiu Krikmann (ENG to EST), Anita Kodanik (ENG to RUS)
English Proof-Reading: Epp Aareleid
Graphic Design: Kersti Heile

Edition of 200.

A Body with More Tongues is a Mythical Creature is a small publication accompanied by a set of playing cards. It builds upon Paper Notes and Pinecones, a solo exhibition I presented in May 2024 at HAM Gallery, Helsinki, and marks the culmination of my research into how living in a foreign country reshapes the way we move and physically relate to the world around us.

Contributors: Chen Nadler, Daniela Pascual, Francesca Berti, Giorgio Convertito, Giorgia Lolli, Isabella Covertino, Tashi Iwaoka, and others
Edited by: M. Winter
Music by: Jenny Berger Myhre
Illustrations by: Valentina Černiauskaitė
Design by: Ran-Re Reimann
Supported by: Kone Foundation, Nordic Culture Point, and the Finnish Art Society

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her inclusive work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She founded 'Deep Listening(R), ' which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. 'Deep Listening is my life practice, ' Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through Pauline Oliveros Publications and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc

This book is part of Nico Boon’s doctoral thesis at the Associated Faculty of the Arts (KU Leuven/LUCA School of Arts). His research started out as an investigation into the legacy of the well-made play, but soon morphed into a more paradoxical, ambiguous, and tentative inquiry. In About Playwriting (A Lecture), Boon approaches playwriting as a practice of continuous improvisation, in which chance, rhythmic intuitions, auditory awareness, bodily impulses, shapeshifting, and experimenting are more important than fixed narrative structures, or clear meanings, or distinct boundaries. He views playwriting as a transgressive enterprise that always refuses to choose a definitive form. This is Book 1 in a series of works about playwriting.

“If you look
under your hood,
you will see that
in the middle of
the intricate landscape
that we call
the human brain,
there lives…
a little seahorse.”

"The thing is:
a clock is not time,
a map is not a landscape,
a mirror is not an eye.
And a plot is not a play."

A beautiful compilation of poems, stories, essays, talks, and illustrations by Ursula K. Le Guin. Edited and designed by Conner Bouchard-Roberts. 

With additional essays on Le Guin's thinking and craft by: adrienne maree brown, Isabelle Stengers, Moe Bowstern, Lola Milholland, Nisi Shawl, David Naimon, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Margaret Killjoy, Julie Phillips, and Harold Bloom.

This book serves as the companion publication to a gallery exhibition, of the same name, about Ursula’s life and work, showing at Oregon Contemporary Museum (from Nov 1st 2025 - Feb 8th 2026 in Portland, OR) curated by the Author’s son, Theo Downes-Le Guin.

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.

Ursula K. Le Guin began writing as a poet, before writing across genres for her entire life. This elegiac collection of poems, completed shortly before her death in 2018, reflects on the soul, mortality and the mysteries beyond. Weaving together rich sounds, echoes of myth and her vivid sense of our place in the natural world, So Far So Good walks between the knowable and the unknown with characteristic daring.

“great teacher. great spirit.” adrienne maree brown