Close to The Knives

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’

Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition November 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-8-9
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.

Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell, and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Mo0on/IO with Lindsay Choi.

The fourth in a series of publications, featuring writing by graphic design students of EKA GD MA. Typing... includes essays, scripts, translations and stories on a wide range of topics: killing vowels and milling fonts, personal knowledge management, shortcuts, tedious/careful/tiring/joyful typesetting, type of Georgianness, typing in 3rab(izi) and typing in all lowercase.

With contributions by Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Archil Tsereteli, Fa(tima)-Ezzahra El Khammas, João (Juca) Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Kranjc.

Designed by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens
Cover by Hanafi Gazali

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.

Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.