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Cover of Groove, Bang and Jive Around

Blank Forms

Groove, Bang and Jive Around

Steve Cannon

€18.00

New edition of Steve Cannon's riotous 1969/71 erotic novel Groove, Bang and Jive Around, "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth," with a foreword from Darius James and an afterword by poet Tracie Morris.

Despite decades of notoriety as one of the "filthiest books in the world," Steve Cannon's first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris- based Ophelia Press in 1969.

Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth." This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon's place as a stalwart of the East Village and key figure in New York's black avant-garde—inspiring a generation to break with staid literary modernism, according to Cannon's friend and collaborator Ishmael Reed, for whom its release "signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature." Seeped psychedelia and hoodoo, this erotic farce follows Anette, a fourteenyear- old runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee, a realm of bacchanalian self-determination founded by Dizzy Gillespie. Inspired equally by Chester Himes and Women's Liberation, the author claims—as Ophelia put it, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is an absolute necessity "for everyone who wants to know where and how the action takes place in Sex and Soul."

"If there's a dirty prayer, this is it. Groove, Bang and Jive Around will invariably piss people off, that's the plan and its delight. It's gorgeously uneven, like a country road, it's squawking & sonorous like great live music, indeed, it is that. Groove, Bang is poetry and a novel out loud, and Steve Cannon, who wrote it was a huge heckler and a funny man and I wish I could thank him for this wonderful disturbing, deeply wrong (hot) and light-footed book that somehow fell out of reading history he has given us and now it has fallen back in."—Eileen Myles, author of a Working Life

Steve Cannon (1935-2019) was a writer who shaped the literary history of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was the founder and executive director of A Gathering of the Tribes, an East Village nonprofit and exhibition space, and the publisher of a magazine of the same name. Tribes, which operated from Cannon's Alphabet City townhouse, functioned as a salon where artists and musicians such as David Hammons, Sun Ra, and Butch Morris could reliably be found among a cohort of younger poets emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. Born to a preacher in New Orleans, Cannon relocated to New York from England in 1962, where, alongside such luminaries as Amiri Baraka and Calvin C. Hernton, Cannon joined the Umbra Workshop, a cornerstone of the 1960s African American avant-garde poetry and publishing. In 1973 he, Ishmael Reed, and Joe Johnson cofounded the influential literary and audio/visual imprint Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. As a poet, playwright, and professor, Cannon mentored a generation of writers including Eileen Myles and Paul Beatty, and taught across the City University of New York system for more than three decades.

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Cover of Blank Forms #07 – The Cowboy's Dreams of Home

Blank Forms

Blank Forms #07 – The Cowboy's Dreams of Home

Joe Bucciero, Lawrence Kumpf

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.

Cover of A Strange Celestial Road – My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra

Blank Forms

A Strange Celestial Road – My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra

Louis Reyes Rivera, Ahmed Abdullah

In this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the rise of New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s.

In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s. Richly illustrated with seventy-two pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author's own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road isnot only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.

Ahmed Abdullah (Leroy Bland) joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre's Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is music director at the historic venue Sistas' Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn.

Louis Reyes Rivera (1945-2012) was a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn. Known as the "Dean of Nuyorican Poetics," he led creative writing workshops in community centers and prisons across New York, lectured on Latin and Black diasporic history and literature at New York colleges including Hunter, Boricua, Pratt, and Stony Brook; and was a leader in the 1969 student movement at CUNY, leading to the founding of its department of ethnic studies. Rivera was also a prolific editor, working on books such as John Oliver Killens's Great Black Russian: The Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, and a translator of works by Puerto Rican poets Clemente Soto Velez and Otto Rene Castillo. His own poetry collections include Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), which received an award from the Latin American Writers Institute.

Cover of Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader

DABA

Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader

Adam Pendleton

Essays €40.00

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Cover of The Wolfboy of Rego Park

Far West Press

The Wolfboy of Rego Park

Jeffrey Wengrofsky

Fiction €14.00

Half pre-adolescent gothic fantasia, half inter-species rumor mongering, and half amulet of protection, The Wolfboy of Rego Park is jam-packed with fists of fury, monstrous characterization, puerile recklessness and looney tunes ruminations set afloat in a gooey colloidal suspension. Pin your hair down and take a spin on this merry-go-round of wayward urban woolgathering.

Cover of BRICKS FROM THE KILN #7

Bricks from the Kiln

BRICKS FROM THE KILN #7

Helen Marten, Harriet Moore and 1 more

Fiction €20.00

Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

Cover of I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women

Les Figues Press

I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women

Vanessa Place, Teresa Carmody and 2 more

Fiction €45.00

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

Cover of Sphinx

Deep Vellum

Sphinx

Anne Garréta

Fiction €15.00

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.