Exquisite Mariposa

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.

A vivid, haunting tale of intergenerational trauma and survival under Israeli occupation. 

A New Arab Book of the Year 2021.

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time.

For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived?

In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.

Yara Hawari is a Palestinian writer and political commentator. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on oral history and Indigenous Studies. She currently works as a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. The Stone House is her first book.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.

This hybrid literary collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

‘Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close… Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it.’ – Kate Briggs

Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie now for roughly twenty years.

A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss. 

Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group. Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.” Garréta is also the author of In Concrete, translated by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2021).

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of poetry and prose from France, the Middle East, and North Africa. She is the recipient of a Fulbright, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and the 2018 Albertine Prize. Her translations for Deep Vellum include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and In Concrete, Fouad Laroui's The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers, and Brice Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator.

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.