Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic

Inch Aeons is a meditation on the form of meaning, the nature of nature, and the locality of tradition in an over-wired-world.

Here, award-winning poet Nuala Archer adopts, breaks and recreates the limits of haiku, evoking moments of collision and convergence, from "Beyond Conception- / Without Regeneration- / Big Bang's Leave let Be" to "Am-Is-Are-Was-Were- / Has-Have-Had-Do-Does-Did-Shall- / Should-Can-Could-Will-Would-."

Poet Juliet Patterson calls Inch Aeons "a complex and wondrous book," while poet Pam Ore says the poems are "like starlight, resonat[ing] with the brightness of an original violence, cooling-healing and coalescing into the word."

Published as part of the TrenchArt Casements series, Inch Aeons includes inside illustrations by Japanese artist Tamzo and visual art (back cover) by American artist Molly Corey.

Nuala Archer is the author of Whale on the Line, Two Women, Two Shores (with Medbh McGuckian), PAN/AMA, and From a Mobile Home. She served as the primary English-language editor for University Over the Abyss: The Story Behind 520 Lecturers & 2,430 Lectures in Kz Theresienstadt 1942-1944. In 1995 she survived a catastrophic car accident; recovering in Jerusalem, she enrolled in a theatre degree program at the School of Visual Theatre. Archer continues to perform with the Jerusalem Theatre Company at festivals around the world, including in Auschwitz, London, Dublin, New Delhi, Bangalore, Seoul and Kagoshima. She is an Associate Professor at Cleveland State University.

+|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is book 1, volume 2 of a wider, ongoing project known as "For Love Alone" Christina'S-tead, a poetic enquiry into the current state of the English tongue.

"In a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Wertheim's +|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written in part as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments. But even more, it is fun to read for its word play"—Juliana Spahr.

Introduction by Dodie Bellamy and art by Lisa Darms.

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

Contributors to Starship № 20:

Rosa Aiello, Terry Atkinson, Tenzing Barshee, Gerry Bibby, Mercedes Bunz, David Bussel, Jay Chung, Eric D. Clark, Caleb Considine, Hans-Christian Dany, Albert Dichy, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ruth Angel Edwards, Stephanie Fezer, Jean Genet, Simone Gilges, Julian Göthe, Michèle Graf, Selina Grüter, Ulrich Heinke, Toni Hildebrandt, Beatrice Hilke, Karl Holmqvist, Stephan Janitzky, G. Peter Jemison, Charlotte Johannesson, Julia Jost, Julia Jung, Jakob Kolding, Nina Könnemann, Lars Bang Larsen, Anita Leisz, Norman Lewis, Elisa R. Linn, Sebastian Lütgert, Vera Lutz, Chloée Maugile, Robert McKenzie, Ariane Müller, Christopher Müller, Robert M. Ochshorn, Henrik Olesen, Kari Rittenbach, Nina Rhode, Ulla Rossek, Cameron Rowland, Mark von Schlegell, Ryan Siegan Smith, Philipp Simon, Valerie Stahl Stromberg, Josef Strau, Vera Tollmann, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Amelie von Wulffen and Florian Zeyfang.

"This is the 20th issue of Starship and we are proud and very happy to present it, and mainly want to thank all the artists, the contributors, the columnists, and the people who helped us gather images of exhibitions past, and gave us texts from books not yet published. Starship never starts with a clear concept about its future content, or what could be called a theme, but always with a sort of attentive interest. The theme may develop through its columnists—we now think it is easy to distinguish lines of thoughts, images, and texts answering each other. But it surely does so out of this editorial interest that wanders, and finds, and collects, is enthusiastic about artworks, and texts, and people, and then, well, brings this all together in a magazine. This was our working mode during the past year, and the responsiveness of those who regularly write for Starship (the columnists) has shown us that out there others are involved in thoughts that run very much in parallel. It is a strange form, a magazine like this, not getting funded, appearing irregularly, but still following a sort of conventional form that shows its consistency. It is at its core an excess of producing something that might prove itself valuable and liberating in the future."
—Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.

John Wieners (1934-2002) was a founding member of the New American poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957-1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as the greatest poet of emotion of their time.

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation. —Don Mee Choi

Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable. —Alfred Schaffer

Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun. —Kaveh Akbar

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).