Nite Soil

Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail."

Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

Auditing Intimacy is a collection of postal correspondence, photographs and declassified documents produced by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly between 2015 and 2020 under the banner of their shared practice The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. In a spirit of transparency and full disclosure, the publication contains a certified, independent and critical audit of the practice by Alicja Melzacka. The project was undertaken to commemorate the fifth anniversary of O.J.A.I.

Edited by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Artworks by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Essay by Alicja Melzacka
Design by Zero Desk
Documentation by Pauline Miko
Published by Fantôme Verlag
174 pages

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE). The work is fuelled by a recurring obsession with architecture, infrastructure, finance,  institutional power and DIY ritualism. O.J.A.I. pursues a strategy of self-institutionalisation where tools and codified rules of engagement are appropriated from economic and political infrastructures for the purposes of structuring intimacy and conjuring autonomy.

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.

Oppenheim's poetry, 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980, moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, 'express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.' A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included Andér Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that 'the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.' The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Afternoon Editions no. 1: an essay by Jeroen Peeters titled Reseeding the library, gleaning readership. In May 2017, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine settled during three weeks in the Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Invited as a writer in residence, Jeroen Peeters visited the library of living books on a daily basis and recorded his observations by hand in a notebook, which formed the basis for Afternoon Edition #1. Reseeding the library, gleaning readership is an essay on the seed library, on the dispersion of literature through wind, water and animals, on biodiversity and commoning at the heart of readership. On the cover a drawing by Wouter Krokaert of a Philodendron Xanadu. Published May 2018.

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.