Broken Glass

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who’s who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno’s use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s.

Subduing Demons in America offers the best of Giorno’s revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art–influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection molding factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor—making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.

Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.

MATTHEW RICE was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in poetry from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, highly commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and included in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.

In this genre- and gender-breaking work of theory-fiction, legendary writer and cofounder of the 1970s French feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body—lesbian, literary and defiantly political—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature. 

First published in French in 1973, The Lesbian Body mines the relationship between a lover and a beloved—also a writer and a text—to explore the ideological and historical constructions of the female subject. Organized according to the principle of montage, poetic passages are juxtaposed with anatomic lists that mark lesbian eros. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado.

“The Lesbian Body is a fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness.” — Sarah Schulman

“In this stunning new rendering of The Lesbian Body by the French author, theorist, activist and teacher, the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time.” — Esther Newton

“To read the book is to be forced by Wittig into another grammar and happily contaminated by its strange forms. You will never think straight again.” — Jack Halberstam

“For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart.” — Judith Butler

“Together with Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, Wittig is the first to design a nonbinary utopia, a world in which the binary categorization of sexes and genders will have ceased to exist.” — Paul B. Preciado

Introduction by Paul B. Preciado
Translated by David Le Vay

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth's rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is "hard of hearing" but "full of life."

Once upon a time there was a shopping center just off Dam Square, a stone’s throw from the Madame Tussauds, not far from Primark, two streets across De Bijenkorf overshadowing the Magna Plaza, and just a couple doors down the Royal Palace in the middle of Amsterdam. It was the place where drag queen Tuu Lipa performed and Yeung sold eau de car engine oil. It was also where Mr. R looked for his human lover, where Inez became a millionaire, and where Yahoo launched its metaverse. “Welcome to the YAniverse,” greeted the Yahoo assistant…

Retail Vérité is the outcome of writing workshops organized by A Maior at San Serriffe. Through a blend of improvisation, larping and speed dating, the participants sketched characters and dialogues on-site.
This cohort featured Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu and others.

A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has taken place within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Verité, A Maior’s first novella.

With A Maior, Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.