Hannah Weiner's Open House

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to “color-code emotions,” she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise—a work that creates its own poetics. She sought “a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition” of her own mind and to “perform this process of translation” on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called “magnificent.”

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling.

"In Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."—Thom Donovan

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.