Glossolalia

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

An homage and reimagining of the classic German Bildungsroman, Schernikau paid tribute to the form even as he challenged stylistic, sexual, and political conventions. Written in all lower-case, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows b, a teenager navigating politics and queer desire in a small, West German town. When b—who is interested in communism and knitting—falls in love with leif, a popular jock, b’s life at school is very predictably upended.

“A mighty, slender record of the provocative intelligence of a queer teenage mind.” —Eliot Duncan

Ronald M. Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).

Lucy Jones is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.

PRAISE

“This slender book is a fierce account of queer teenage imagination: provocative, haughty, coy, insolent, and wild. As angsty as it is intelligent, Schernikau’s prose also feels protective and sweet. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is the book, the friend, I wish I had in high school.” —Eliot Duncan

“…an earnest, seemingly offhand account of a brilliant young man growing up in a small town and realizing that his queerness and his communist politics will come to structure his life. (…) the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society." —Ben Miller & Nicholas Courtman, LARB

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

A new edition of Anzaldúa's classic text.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border' is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

‘I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.’

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in’. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death – how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural ‘you’ speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with ‘Face of Rhythm’, a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize