Nioque of the Early-Spring

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, PACES THE CAGE, lifts off from their previous book, Wild Peach (2020), by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds and a musical language and tone used throughout the book helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative collection by this adventurous and endlessly exciting artist. As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking, and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators.

PACES THE CAGE extends S*an D. Henry-Smith’s interdisciplinary, improvisational listening into a poetics of “fissure and measure,” where silence and the sonic converge in boundless motion. Tuning language toward the frequencies of breath, pulse, and sociality, Henry-Smith's poems transport us from natural worlds to communal forms to Bill Gunn’s STOP, recovering wayward images and utterances to compose a surround sound of loss and renewal. What emerges is both reckoning and remedy—a lush sensitivity to the ways language becomes live, as in now, as in “eyes open, full of rage.”

–Maxe Crandall

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s reverberant propositions seek the music of mutual renewal, constantly and impatiently approaching the present. This is a field of spiraling, alliterative song, the wild signature of Henry-Smith’s lyric, that renews commitments to militancy by naming and knowing its enemies as doubtlessly as it names and knows it lovers. PACES THE CAGE considers a set of conditions—technical, material phenomena—that produce collective and contradictory imaginations and gives words to the song that makes the gathering last, “all in for all…” PACES THE CAGE is a beautiful rehearsal of attentiveness, a rigorous and generous correspondence with the edges of the frame.      

– dove, Christine Kirubi

S*an's PACES THE CAGE recalls to me Akilah Oliver’s 2004 An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. A lyrical unleashing into the many selves, the author here plays conduit for many beautiful bodies; for those souls wandering at daybreak; for the pudgy greased cheeks and those that murmur in the dew of twilight uncloaked. It is as if the poet has extracted from the marsh, the runoff, roundup and peat to stockpile and make lush a new yet familiar world. S*an has created a collection of diamonds from the salty mines of turtle tears. The divorced defanged possessive absent its apostrophe, left to the mud puddle for butterfly nuptials throughout, tells the reader: How you know me Now will be Different from how you knew me. These buoyant poems that are S*an’s latest songs have not missed the train this time. Make certain that you don’t. I’m in awe.

–LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs 

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

In The Infinite Now, Taras Gembik crafts an intimate meditation on solitude, faith, and the search for meaning, ten years in the making. Moving between Ukraine and Poland, these twenty-five poems trace a decade-long journey of self-discovery.

Through stark winter evenings and quiet conversations, Gembik's verses explore ancient and universal questions of existence and identity: the nature of God, the comfort of walls and communion with others, the circular path of memory. The collection transforms everyday moments into profound reflections on love, displacement, how to build community, and the possibility of finding home in transience.

Taras Gembik (born Kamin-Kashyrskyi, 1996, lives in Warsaw, Poland) is a poet, curator, performer, and activist. He is the curator of the public programme at Zachęta National Gallery of Warsaw, where in 2024 he also curated, together with Joanna Kordjak, Siergiej Parajanov's retrospective. Since 2018, he has worked with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to provide a platform for refugees and those afflicted by the homelessness crisis. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he co-created the Sunflower Solidarity Community Centre, praised in an extensive profile in Frieze Magazine, as part of a dossier on "Forms of Resistance".

Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.

Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.

Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

L’Île-de-France a été engloutie. Submergée par de l’eau liquide. C’est à peu près tout ce que l’on sait. Crue est un long poème construit sur un rythme ternaire, une suite de tercets libres entrecoupés de symboles typographiques étranges dont la signification exacte semble avoir été perdue dans l’inondation. Il y a dans le va-et-vient soutenu du texte comme dans celui de la mer, ses gestes répétés, toujours successifs, quelque chose de l’automation ; l’acceptation sans révolte d’une nouvelle nature sous-marine hybride, plus uniquement humaine, à la langue noyée, gorgée de néologismes, méthodique, néanmoins sentimentale. Car ici la cruauté sinistre de la nature fait écho aux émotions du narrateur. Le paysage-état d’âme est désolé, apocalyptique mais comme résigné, nu. Crue sonde les abysses de la civilisation et des comportements humains. Peut-être un des textes les plus personnels de Théo Robine-Langlois.

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

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