Candles and Water

Responses to Untitled (eye with comet) (c.1985) by Paul Thek is the sixth and final anthology in a series that gathered responses to works of art made during a period of the ongoing AIDS Crisis, from the identification of the virus in 1981 to the introduction of life-saving drugs in 1996.  

In this sixth iteration, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988. 

List of contributors in order of appearance:

E.R. De Siqueira
Ben Estes
João Motta Guedes
Lucy Swan
Jon Rainford
Louis Shankar
Amy Evans Bauer
Hattie Morrison
Sammy Paloma
AN Grace
James Horton
Nick Wood
Sophie Paul
Jae Vail
Elizabeth Zvonar
Lars Meijer
Clay AD
Michel Kessler
Pablo Miguel Martínez
Emma Harris
Dylan McNulty-Holmes
Kitya Mark
Katherine Franco
Ainslie Templeton
Alistair McCartney
John Brooks
Jesse Howarth
jimmy cooper
Felix Pilgrim
Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
Murphy O’Neir
Rachel Cattle
Isabel Nolan
Susan Finlay
Ted Simonds
Brooke Palmieri
Kate Morgan
Ashleigh A. Allen
Diogo Gama
JP Seabright
Hugo Hagger
Amanda Kraley
Brendan Cook
Matt Bailey
Charlotte Flint
Rodney Schreiner
Lucy Price
Morgan Melhuish
Jordan Weitzman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Alex Fiorentino
Harald Smart
Marguerite Carson
loll jung
Richard Porter
Nicholas Kalinoski
Hedi El Kholti
Edmund Francis English
Ted Bonin

Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha.

John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist. 

‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’
— Nat Raha, from the introduction

'Solitary Pleasure is a selected collection of Wieners’ poems, appended with letters and journal entries. An introduction, written by contemporary poet Nat Raha, makes a powerful case for reading Wieners’ work as art born from “the heart of struggle”. The poems themselves are offhand and diaristic. Sometimes, they deploy childlike rhymes that purposely steer close to nonsense, successfully generating a sense of wonder (“If I had a canoe / I’d fill it with you / Then what would you do”). The Wieners of Solitary Pleasure is a poet eager to vocalise queer desire. “The beauty of men never disappears,” he writes, later portraying desire as something that must be “choked” out of him. Occupying nearly a third of Solitary Pleasure are his “Asylum Poems”, which Wieners wrote in 1969 – the summer of the Stonewall riots – while in a psychiatric institution. These poems spotlight the connection between art and affliction, but challenge us to consider creative expression as a very real mode of survival and salvation, and not merely, as current wellness discourses suggest, a potential curative or preventive to mental ill-health.'
— Ralf Webb for The Guardian

A new edition of the posthumously published collection 'A Book of Music' by the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965).

While little known outside a circle of friends and poets in his lifetime, Spicer is widely considered one of the major figures of twentieth century American poetry. 

After being removed from a teaching position at Berkeley in 1950 for refusing to pledge allegiance to the United States, he became a founder of the radical and counter-cultural San Francisco Renaissance movement of poets in an age when homosexuality was illegal. 

He believed that the poet was a “radio” able to collect transmissions from an “invisible world,” as opposed to the idea that poetry was driven by a poet’s voice and will. In this sense he believed that his poems were dictated from a spirit world and saw poetry as a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. 

He died at the age of 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital, from acute alcohol poisoning. One of his last coherent sentences was, “My vocabulary did this to me.”

This new edition of A Book of Music, published 65 years after its original was composed, is risograph printed on Munken Lynx paper and saddle-stitched by Earthbound Press. 

The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs.

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

Paperback
252pp
ISBN: 9781739364977

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

The trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.

In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting …

Ann Rower's first book, If You're a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan.

Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories—urtexts of female autofiction—had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else's: disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You're a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary's babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker.

Rower went on to publish two novels: Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You're a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian.

This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You're a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower's influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.

Ann Rower is the author of If You're A Girl, Armed Response, and Lee & Elaine. She received a PhD from Columbia University in sixteenth-century English literature in 1974, and has collaborated with the Wooster Group as a writer. Rower taught writing in New York at the School for Visual Arts between 1974 and 2019.

Introduction by Sheila Heti.