Lola the Interpreter

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds. 

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues—technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—have only become more pressing with the passage of time. 

The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is—you!

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman’s magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” - Lyn Hejinian

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.

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover. 

Blood On The Tracks is an elaboration and cacophony of manic friendship, eroticism and poetic play. Writing into the lyrical text of Bob Dylan's 1975 Album of the same title, the two authors take inspiration from Raymond Roussel's generative mode of translation, and quickly transform the lyrics of Blood On The Tracks into a variety of languages, to then translate these lyrics back into the English text present in the book. The result is a complicated and combative free wheeling text that explores the possibility of co-authorship, and interpretive translation. Featuring a forward by confirmed tramp, filmmaker and photographer Bill Daniel.

The second poetry collection from artist, curator and writer Hana Pera Aoake. The book begins with a placenta placed into a Pohutukawa tree and spirals out across manifold interrogations and anecdotes of the poet’s life. the poetry harnesses a vibrant decolonial commentary on the life/death cycle:

“Bodies that span the past, present and future 
It’s non linear, omnipresent, human and non human” 

The poetry maps ways in which the lived and living memories of colonial histories are held, endured and warped inside one’s body, which is to say the whole Earth.  “Pain and age are knotted together” she states. In many ways the book attempts to illustrate a delicate symbiosis of all living and non-living things, yet localises the pain and joy which manifests from these systems within her own life. The poetry asks how ideology changes the way we love, parent and make art.

Hana Pera Aoake expands these cyclical frameworks of flux and impermanence across her otherwise diaristic and witty verse. Hana Pera Aoake writes on sculpture, anger, labor, detention, greed, genocide, the ocean, the family, sovereignty, sanity and love. The writing spares no opportunity for irony and opinion, housing articulations of political dreaming within a resilient and potent humour. The book is generous in its exploration of Māori belief systems and indigenous solidarity as much as it is on rhythmic, free-associative verse. An exciting and expansive collection of poems. 

In You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More, Serubiri Moses offers an intimate and personal study of the lives and loves of pop star Freddy Mercury, combining a detailed epigraphy on the duplicitous nature of Mercury's origins, sexuality, and artistic talent with his own delicate memoir as a poet. Through this series of interlocked poems, yet again Moses lures us into an atmosphere both sensual and scholarly that echoes well past its last verse.

With ardor and grace, Serubiri Moses traverses a catalogue of pop music, visual art, and cultural history to bring his readers to a state of openness — to love, to art, and the freewill of ecstatic experience. Moses’s writing forefronts pleasure as a gateway for deeper critical inquiry, braiding personal memory and epigraphic excursions into sex, stardom, and poetry, reminding us in this journey that "pleasure almost happens without us knowing."
— Tausif Noor

Serubiri Moses, Ugandan curator and author, lives in New York City. He serves as a part-time faculty member at Hunter CUNY, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held faculty positions at New York University, and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Chazen Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL), and University of the Arts Helsinki (FL). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. He has curated solo presentations of Carl E. Hazlewood, Reza Aramesh, and is working on a retrospective of Taryn Simon. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal and his short stories have appeared in print in Ursula, and online in Lolwe. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). He is the author of the poetry collection THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK (2023; Pântano Books).