Bosch'd

Written between 1984 and 1995, this new edition collects three essays by Etel Adnan meditating on a life lived in motion: intellectual, geographic, linguistic and artistic perpetual motion. Published in honor of Adnan’s centennial (2025), these essays are a beacon and remain a piercing and profound model for reckoning with and surviving our times of war and exile.

Voyage, War, and Exile collects three essays by Etel Adnan that present a multilayered meditation on the author’s life within and without Beirut. Adnan reflects upon the intricacies of family, place, and language, asking what it means to be an Arab woman and writer in exile at the end of a century in which “Exile became the existential and metaphysical condition for every Arab.” At once deeply personal to the life of the author and yet ubiquitous in inquiry, Voyage, War, Exile pulls us into the shifting landscape of Lebanon and the United States in the 20th Century through a weaving of philosophical reflection and memory. This volume includes artwork by Simone Fattal.

Praise for Etel Adnan

The work of Etel Adnan—poet, painter, philosopher—is an interrogation of the human experience and a study in worldly engagement…Sorting through decades of memory, loss, and linguistic turns, we drift with her in a sea of thought and expansive meditation. —K.B. Thors, The Lambda Literary Review

Her poetry has the capacity to assemble and discern the ‘sides’ of the self as well as the literature and literary personalities which frame the self of her writing. —Matt Turner, Hyperallergic

Adnan’s receptivity is evident in her fine-tuned attention to detail, at the microscopic and cosmic level alike. Her lens shifts in scale and orientation, defamiliarizing the surroundings we thought we knew and re-introducing us to nature.—Noa Micaela Fields, Medium

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Murder is Danielle Collobert’s first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, Murder’s accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.

Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert’s parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert’s extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert’s works available in English include In the Environs of a Film (Litmus Press, 2019), Notebooks, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and It Then (O Books, 1989).

For this collection of poems and prose, Leslie Scalapino has gathered four sequences into what she calls an “aeolotropic series.” The poems reflect each other like crystals and change like highly polished glass illuminated by a shifting light. They follow the mind from thought and observation to afterthought, reflection, and obsession.

Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, and essays, including numerous collaborations with artists, writers, and dancers. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.

This selection of Gertrude Stein's work is taken from the period between 1905 and 1936, when the iconic modernist poet was engaged in an astounding number of still-surprising literary experiments, whose innovations continue to influence all the arts. Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. 

In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a "continuous present," an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era—from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time. Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative "reading poesis" for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it. 

TEXTS
Melanctha (excerpt, from Three Lives, 1905)
The Making of Americans (excerpt, 1911)
Picasso (1911)
Flirting at the Bon Marche (1911)
Bon Marche Weather (1911)
Orta or One Dancing (excerpt, 1912)
Susie Asado (1912)
Tender Buttons: Objects, Food (1913)
Scenes from the Door (from Useful Knowledge, 1918)
Photograph (1920)
A Movie (1920)
An Elucidation (1923)
If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923)
Fourteen Anonymous Portraits (1923)
Are There Arithmetics (1923)
Business in Baltimore (1925)
Composition as Explanation (1926)
Patriarchal Poetry (excerpt, 1927)
Sentences and Paragraphs (from How to Write, 1930)
History or Messages from History (1930)
We Came. A History (1930)
Stanzas in Meditation (excerpt, 1932)
Lecture I (from Narration, 1934)
Identity a Poem (1935)
What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

DOCUMENTS
“With Apologies to Gertrude Stein,” newspaper advertisement
Two love notes from Stein to Toklas (n.d.): “Dear dainty
delicious darling” and “Ir/Re/Sis/Ti /Belle”
Virgil Thomson, Letter to Gertrude Stein (May 30, 1933)
“Stein Opera Sung by All-Negro Cast,” New York Times (February 9, 1934)
Thornton Wilder, Introduction to Narration (1935)

Personal space is understood as the distance between 45 and 120 cm that surrounds a person. This bilingual anthology brings together the work of eighteen contemporary poets who take this intimate measurement as a starting point to challenge its apparent rigidity and explore how political, social, sexual, racial, class, and accessibility factors shape it. Beyond a simple physical distance, personal space also becomes a stage where desire draws and negotiates the boundaries between the inside and the outside.

The publication contains contributions by Samuel Ace, Justin Chin, Kyle Dacuyan, Rhea Dillon, Tracy Faud, Elijah Jackson, Taylor Johnson, Nadia Marcus, Park McArthur, Nat Raha, Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Juan de Salas, María Salgado, Assotto Saint, Cedar Sigo, S*an D.Henry-Smith, Nayare Soledad, Perla Zúñiga.

Bilingual edition, edited by Juf.

JUF (Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra) explores the relationship between poetry, contemporary art, and theatricality through the organization of performances, readings, and exhibitions. They also publish online texts and a PDF series as an extension of their curatorial and research practice. Currently based between Madrid and New York.

A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why?

Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory—ancestral, personal, and poetic—and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art.

Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (2023). She is also the author of the prose book Animal (2019) and a forthcoming book about Sappho, as well as the editor of Essays (2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (2013). Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other places.

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.

Writing on navigating the workplace as an ambulatory wheelchair user, how sex work can be a means of survival, re-imagining 'Christina's World', the boundaries of our bodies, an interview with Caren Beilin, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.

Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Laura Baliman, Caren Beilin, Amy Berkowitz, Leah M. Bowie, Kaitlin D'Avella, Lindsy Davis, Katherine DeCoste, Yining Fang, Emily Freeman, Maria Gray, Bec Mackenzie, Ariana Martinez, Chloe McGreal, Ryann McKinney, Iyla Owens, Emily Pinkerton, Marin Scarlett, Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh, Anna Stiles, Maeve Sweeney, & J Min Wang.

SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.

"Desperate and playful. This iterative poetic series cries through the panic of now to bestill an ecstatic people. Paranoid Citi finds no doubt that if understanding is a matter of form, survival necessitates transformation." - Crystal Odelle, author of Trans Studies

"Who doesn't like to post ethereal lightly? Who isn't a citizenry draped in lilac ethics? Are you a froth? In Shannon Hearn's PARANOID CITI, an interrogative story is shaping up. She's uploading music for grace in crisis. She's writing poems for you, citizen, and kindly so." - Nick Sturm

Includes a bag tag and drawing by Elise Houcek.
Published as part of Paraphernalia and Addenda 2.2 of Tabloid Publications.

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.

A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.