Interiors

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance.

That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.

D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.

Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad. 

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century. 

At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips 

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki