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Cover of Corona

Station Hill Press

Corona

Paul Celan

€17.00

Paul Celan, arguably one of the mid-20th century's most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust, a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, CORONA charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan's large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published.

The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan's periods and genres. Without ignoring the poet's well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan's love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse.

Susan H. Gillespie's translations are characterized by their ease of diction and their attention to the "somatic" and rhetorical aspects of Celan's lines, their sound, gait, tone, and gravity, as well as to their internal and external echoes. The latter, elucidated in notes to the poems, include references to other poets and to Celan's wide readings of everything from specialized dictionaries to other writers, what Roman Jakobson called their "poetic etymology." "Here, poetry is not what gets lost in translation," writes Gillespie in the Introduction, "it is, itself, an act of translation, of experience and thought, into new language."

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Cover of Anabases

Archive Books

Anabases

Eric Baudelaire

This book documents an installation by Eric Baudelaire revisiting the political and personal saga of the Japanese Red Army as an anabasys—an allegory of a journey that is both a wandering into the unknown and a return back home.

“This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do not roll out continuously but superimpose each other to infinity, creating not a compendium of knowledge but a web of prescience. It does not follow a logical framework but unfurls a grid with multiple entries. It does not assert a set subject or conclusive postulate. At most it invites us to probe the recesses of a mind in motion, and steeps us in the driving material that brings it to life. It reflects the works it exhibits, the documents it discloses and the commentary it generates: it aspires to ubiquity. Anabasis, the very real linking thread that stitches it together, serves not just as an archaeological enigma, but also as an allegorical force. The main author of this ocean crossing, Eric Baudelaire, is both a collector of vestiges and a sketcher of wandering lines who has surrounded himself with other meticulous voices (Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm), fellow-travellers in this library secret. Readers will be able to enjoy the gradual unfolding of the story of war and politics whose underlying intellectual and poetic adventure this book enables us to recall—that of its repetitions, ramifications and hybridisations: the story of Anabasis after Anabasis (or from Xenophon's Anabasis to that of Paul Celan by way of Alain Badiou's), from an ancient narrative to its modern reappropriation.” — Morad Montazami 

Edited by Eric Baudelaire and Anna Colin.

Texts by Morad Montazami, Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm.

Cover of The Moon is Reading us a Book

pântano books

The Moon is Reading us a Book

Serubiri Moses

Poetry €16.00

THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is the debut collection of poetry from a writer who displays a wide-ranging palette for storytelling and folklore in a suite of narrative poems. The collection is built around an ensemble of characters that range from known to unknown, through which Serubiri crafts visually-inspired poems that combine the photographic, the intensely personal, and the scholarly. In his book, he manages to domesticate larger-than-life figures, including Zanzibari-born singer-songwriter Freddie Mercury and Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode. Simultaneously pondered and elastic, Serubiri’s poetry lures these figures – and the reader – into an atmosphere that is only as expansive as the interior landscapes he delineates with each succeeding poem. With this he expresses his own doubts and path, from memories of his native Uganda to New York City, through a psychology of decisions and life choices. 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry. 

Cover of Coeur de Lion

Fence Books

Coeur de Lion

Ariana Reines

Poetry €16.00

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.

Cover of Economy as Intimacy (vol.1)

Self-Published

Economy as Intimacy (vol.1)

Eric Peter

Poetry €8.00

A series of choreopoems by Eric Peter. Published at the occasion of 'Assemblages of Intimacy' a group exhibition in a Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam in 2018. 

Cover of Black Case Volume I and II – Return From Exile

Blank Forms

Black Case Volume I and II – Return From Exile

Joseph Jarman

Poetry €20.00

The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member.

Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts.

With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

Cover of Ik hier jij daar

Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas

Ik hier jij daar

Ghayath Almadhoun

Poetry €19.00

'In de poëzie kunnen twee verschillende werelden elkaar ontmoeten, door gedichten kunnen we zonder ID denkbeeldige grenzen overschrijden en in dezelfde denkbeeldige ruimte verblijven. Maar is die ruimte wel dezelfde? Kunnen we losbreken uit onze rollen van slachtoffer en medeplichtige? Kunnen gedichten ons leren ons te identificeren met ongevoelde pijn? Wat spreekt er uit onze ontmoeting op papier?' - Anne Vegter

'Een dichter moet egoïstisch zijn, moet een eenzame wolf zijn, maar soms ontmoeten eenzame wolven elkaar in de wouden en jagen ze samen. Twee dichters, één boek: niet noodzakelijkerwijs om iets nieuws te bouwen, maar om de muren af te breken die ons tegenhouden wanneer we naar de andere oever willen oversteken. De Steen van Rosetta, die ervoor zorgt dat we het ongelezene lezen.' - Ghayath Almadhoun

Ghayath Almadhoun (1979) werd geboren in het Palestijnse vluchtelingenkamp Yarmouk in Damascus als zoon van een Palestijnse vader en een Syrische moeder. Hij studeerde Arabische literatuur aan de Universiteit van Damascus en werkte als cultureel journalist. Sinds 2008 woont hij in Stockholm. In Nederland verscheen in 2014 zijn lovend besproken dichtbundel 'Weg van Damascus'. Anne Vegter woont en werkt in Rotterdam. Van haar hand verschenen onder andere de verhalenbundels 'Ongekuiste versies' en 'Harries hoofdingang' en de dichtbundels 'Aandelen en obligaties', 'Spamfighter' en 'Eiland berg gletsjer'. Haar werk werd meermaals bekroond. De afgelopen vier jaar was ze Dichter des Vaderlands. De gedichten van Ghayath Almadhoun zijn uit het Arabisch vertaald door Djûke Poppinga.