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Cover of La rabbia / Anger

Tenement Press

La rabbia / Anger

Pier Paolo Pasolini

€24.00

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

Language: English

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Cover of Last Movies

Tenement Press

Last Movies

Stanley Schtinter

A publication, durational artwork, and moving-image experience, Schtinter’s debut collection, Last Movies, is an alternative account of the first century of cinema according to the films watched by  a constellation of its most notable stars shortly  before (or at the time of) their deaths.

An extensive and exhaustive research project—a holy book of celluloid spiritualism and old canards—Schtinter questions and reconfigures common knowledge to recast the historic column inches of cinema’s mythological hearsay into a thousand-yard stare. 

Via a series of interlinked vignettes, here we’ve a book in which Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, is seen by American gangster John Dillinger, only for him to be gunned down by federal agents upon leaving the cinema. In which George Cukor watches The Graduate and dies thereafter. In which Bette Davis—given her break by Cukor—watches herself in Waterloo Bridge (the 1940 remake Cukor had been meant to direct), before travelling to France and failing to make it back to Hollywood. In which Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and suffers the stroke that kills him. In which John F. Kennedy watches From Russia with Love at a private ‘casa-blanca’ screening prior to the presidential motorcade reaching Dealey Plaza; in which Burt Topper’s War is Hell exists only in a fifteen-minute cut, considering this is as much as Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen at the Texas Theatre in the wake of JFK’s killing.

Cover of 48Kg.

Tenement Press

48Kg.

Batool Abu Akleen

Poetry €25.00

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

Cover of All My Dead Jesters

Tenement Press

All My Dead Jesters

Nadia de Vries

Poetry €22.00

All My Dead Jesters is an assembly of select poems previously published in de Vries’ first two English language collections—Dark Hour and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018 and 2021 respectively). These old works have been lightly revised for republication, and are paired with poems drawn from a manuscript-in-process to institute an autotelic kaleidoscope of some ten years worth of work in verse. 

De Vries’ poems are spare, terse and epigrammatical—a barroom Bashō—dedicated to the glimmer of a compact glance; the chance, glamour and negative capability of a passing thought; and the slow drip of liquid crystal as colours our present. All My Dead Jesters is a torch song for our ‘poor subjectivity,’  a slow dance with sour times, a ‘[steering] away from [the] gratuitous provocation’ that litters our contemporary outlook. ‘Her competence as a poet lies in her ability to translate visceral vulnerability’ for the page (The Kelvingrove Review / University of Glasgow), as she patchworks a heroic ‘poetry without [a] hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, [...] the map of a world we like to think we know’ [CA Conrad].

Cover of Envois / The Complete Correspondence

Tenement Press

Envois / The Complete Correspondence

Sharon Kivland

Poetry €24.00

Somewhere between fact and fiction, 
memoir and novelisation ... 
a tidal thread of correspondences. 

A novel-in-correspondence, a neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

A publication assembled chronologically—following the yearly seminars of Lacan and structured per their delivery—and in which love emerges as a form of appropriation; a litmus for authenticity; a look book for learning; an atlas for forms of yearning; a map for multimodal thinking; a log book for passing hours; a calendar to keep track of the quickening of time; an itinerary of preoccupations; a discipline; a vocation; a dressing up and dressing down of language; a lens; an aperture; a tool shed; a window; a corridor; and/or an arena of investigation. Kivland was not listening for psychoanalytic theory and she is faithful to the words of her beloved, attuned to his speech towards her and her alone... And yet, well, and yet, all that remains as her master breaks the silence.

Cover of An Anarchist Playbook. Radical Translation Workshop

Tenement Press

An Anarchist Playbook. Radical Translation Workshop

Cristina Viti, Jacob McGuinn and 2 more

Essays €25.00

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

Cover of Boys Alive

New York Review of Books

Boys Alive

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Fiction €17.00

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.

Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.

There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.

Cover of Essay

Krupskaya Books

Essay

Stacy Szymaszek

Poetry €19.00

Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us. — Megan Milks

Stacy Szymaszek has long been a poet attentive to work, and this attention is of course animated by place – whether the urban quotidian and attendant human dramas of previous books, or her present workplace on a dairy farm in upstate New York. In Essay’s conversational, immediate, vulnerable, affecting and affected poems, Szymaszek turns to cows and to the cow-like exhaustion of humans who labor in service of capital’s voracity. Essay is bent to the workday but not beaten down by it. We are offered a visionary form, boldly attendant to the present, to prolong survival without denying death.“The heart of the matter is to be able to keep / loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity / unpredictability and contradictions.” In Essay, Szymaszek has built a bed of hay where we can break from our labors and daydream about the “livelihood where we can all work / a single day and have enough for the year and the work / of the cows can be ended.” — Alli Warren

Cover of Nilling

Book*hug Press

Nilling

Lisa Robertson

Poetry €18.00

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

Cover of Wretched Strangers

Boiler House Press

Wretched Strangers

Ágnes Lehóczky, JT Welsch

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat RahaNisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh

Cover of Tripwire 19 - Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Tripwire Journal

Tripwire 19 - Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

David Buuck, Sean Bonney

Poetry €19.00

Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Don’t say “Rest in Peace,” say Fuck the Police: A Sean Bonney Tribute Portfolio, featuring: Katharina Ludwig, Lama El Khatib & Haytham El Wardany, Anahid Nersessian, Vicky Sparrow, Koshka Duff, Max Henninger, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, D.S. Marriott, Fran Lock, Joey Frances, Mathilda Cullen, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Eve Richens, Sacha Kahir, Uwe Möllhusen & Marie Schubenz, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Linda Kemp, Daniel Eltringham & Fred Carter, Hugo García Manríquez, Jèssica Pujol Duran & Macarena Urzúa Opazo. With additional work by Belén Roca, translated by Noah Mazer, Adelaide Ivánova, translated by Chris Daniels, stevie redwood, Cait O’Kane, Mau Baiocco, Peter Bouscheljong, translated by Jonathan Styles. Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Zhou Xiaojing, Mayamor, translated by Eric Abalajon, Afrizal Malna, translated by Daniel Owen, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, translated by Shook, James Goodwin, Amalia Tenuta. Plus Engagements: Anne Boyer interviewed by Eduardo Rabassa, Gail Scott interviewed by Michael Nardone, Noah Ross on David Melnick, Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pedro Pietri, Coco Fitterman on Ennio Moltedo, Sam Moore on Aaron Shurin, David Grundy on Lorenzo Thomas

Cover of In The Pines

Penguin Books

In The Pines

Alice Notley

Poetry €20.00

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.