Black Hyperbox

Dance of Utter Darkness is a book of subterranean violence and brutalist design. Marked by harsh cuts and dark alcoves.

In the private void of the sewers, two cops scry new crime and punishment from the entrials of sacrified critters. Threading language from the exposed flesh into new systems of control.

You do what you can and at the end Fanon's ghost will be waiting for you.

The Haitian Chronicles is a graphic and brutal history of the Haitian Revolution told across three plays. It is the final work by the influential and groundbreaking playwright Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) and the first play of his to be published in several decades. Though much of his earlier work has been short one-act satires, The Haitian Chronicles takes place across three long plays: The Rise of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Fall of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the one-man drama, Dessalines.

The Haitian Chronicles is an example of Ward's political commitment to satirizing, dramatizing, and revealing the structures of white supremacy throughout the history of this so-called civilization. His first play, Star of Liberty, written at 19 years of age, was based the life of Nat Turner and the slave revolt he led. With The Haitian Chronicles, Ward returns to armed Black rebellion, taking as its subject matter the first and only slave revolt to successfully establish a free state. It is a self-consciously ambitious work of astounding narrative and theatrical scope, featuring over 80 speaking roles and logistically demanding production design. The narrative onslaught chronicling the disgusting brutality of colonial French society and the bloody force it took to overthrow it overwhelms the reader and challenges one to question the structures on which society is built and the violence it continues to perpetuate.

Ward was one of the central, driving forces of the Black Theater movement in the United States. After moving to New York in 1948, he became immersed in the radical political scene in Harlem, writing for The Daily Worker, and studying as an actor. He served as understudy to Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, and began a long friendship with fellow actor Robert Hooks. In 1966, Hooks helped produce Ward’s double bill Happy Ending / Day of Absence. Following the success of these plays, Ward was asked to write an editorial for the New York Times in 1966. His article, titled "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", surveyed the ubiquitous, stifling racism of the American theatre and was widely circulated, earning Ward further recognition for his political and theatrical work. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Ward and Hooks, together with Gerald Krone, founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967. Writing and directing for the NEC over the next several decades, Ward worked with icons such as Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, Leslie Lee, Errol Hill, Charles Fuller, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka. He directed dozens of plays throughout his career including Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, The River Niger and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play. Ward continued to write until his death in 2021– The Haitian Chronicles is the result of over four decades of work, a superb series of plays by an inimitable writer and artist.

Boo-Hooray proudly placed the Douglas Turner Ward Archive at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in 2017. The Archive includes many working drafts of the numerous plays Ward directed and wrote, manuscript materials, and correspondence with other icons of the Black Arts.

The Haitian Chronicles was a winner of the AIGA 50 Books & 50 Cover Award for the work of book designer Martha Ormiston.

Originally published in 1987, Saving Seeds: Metaphors of Lesbian Growth, a special issue of Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine, was created by artist and writer Jenna Weston as a tribute to "magical female-oriented gardens."

From her Introduction: "I have found that, generally speaking, lesbian gardens are works of art. We make intricate designs with twine between sapling posts. Later, these weavings support tomato vines. Bright colored ribbons flutter from the tops of tall bean poles. Raised vegetable beds are sculpted into various graceful shapes. The winding paths are edged in pieces of broken pottery and stones we've found. We build altars in the centers of our gardens, and hold rituals between the onions and the lettuce."

"I asked wimmin to send me drawings and photos and descriptions of their magical female-oriented gardens. The replies came from near and far, and make up a part of this book. The rest of the book contains poems and prose that came directly from my experiences as a gardener and a lesbian."

This reissue reimagines the black and white stapled original in a bounty of earth tones: different colored French Papers are risograph printed in green, brown, and orange ink. The book is handsewn with gradient thread. Also included is a recent interview with Jenna Weston printed as an 11x17 leaflet, reversed with a poster of one of the garden diagrams in the book.

“I had a dream last night in which I was being escorted across the Styx Bridge by a serpent. The bridge, long and thin and seemingly suspended in space, impressed me, and I asked the serpent who it was that had built it. He said something, but I cannot remember what. Upon awakening, I felt terribly lost. It seemed clear to me that my nights were being controlled by mystic forces.”

This 32-page chapbook is an “occult diary” of sorts.

BRENDAN CONNELL was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His works of fiction include Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2013), The Architect (PS Publishing, 2012), Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chômu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013), Cannibals of West Papua (Zagava, 2015), Jottings from a Far Away Place (Snuggly Books, 2015), and Against the Grain Again: The Further Adventures of Des Esseintes (Tartarus Press, 2021). As editor he has worked on various projects, including The Neo-Decadent Cookbook (Eibonvale Press, 2020), which was co-edited by Justin Isis.

Chapbook of 100 hand-numbered copies, lithographically printed on 95 g/m Italian gesso paper with a “hammered” texture. The cover is lithographically printed on 285 g/m recycled birch-colored Italian paper.

Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

Introduction by Elvia Wilk. Contributions by Yu Araki, A.E. Benenson, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sven Lütticken, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spyros Papapetros, Camille Richert, Théo Robine-Langlois, Ian Wallace, and Michelle Wun Ting Wong.

Tyler’s scripts refuse to fix an authorial voice; instead, they make the conditions of authorship itself their subject. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and document, the human and the bureaucratic, the self and its doubles, his work thinks through systems from the inside, often using language as both architecture and trap. In their precision and porousness, I recognize a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy. — Jill Magid

In Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues, a binary that remains constitutive for the ideological continuity of modern life, in all its colonial and capital forms, is undone: digital vs. physical. In troubling that chasm, Coburn plays out the repercussions of these ideologies of anthropomorphic naturalism, guiding us through their resonances, doubles, codings, and relays. But he also renders himself as the relay of these transferences, in the process expanding art’s premodern calling: to exist as an invocation. Reification suddenly appears as what is situated between embodiment and disembodiment, with both potentially destabilized. Some Monologues, the book, is this destabilization’s ideal format: as much documentation, an echo, of Coburn’s works through their scripts, as it is an instruction manual for denaturalizing our sense/s. — Kerstin Stakemeier

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich.