Oval

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection molding factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor—making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.

Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.

MATTHEW RICE was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in poetry from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, highly commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and included in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who’s who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno’s use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s.

Subduing Demons in America offers the best of Giorno’s revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art–influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

Introduction by Elvia Wilk. Contributions by Yu Araki, A.E. Benenson, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sven Lütticken, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spyros Papapetros, Camille Richert, Théo Robine-Langlois, Ian Wallace, and Michelle Wun Ting Wong.

Tyler’s scripts refuse to fix an authorial voice; instead, they make the conditions of authorship itself their subject. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and document, the human and the bureaucratic, the self and its doubles, his work thinks through systems from the inside, often using language as both architecture and trap. In their precision and porousness, I recognize a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy. — Jill Magid

In Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues, a binary that remains constitutive for the ideological continuity of modern life, in all its colonial and capital forms, is undone: digital vs. physical. In troubling that chasm, Coburn plays out the repercussions of these ideologies of anthropomorphic naturalism, guiding us through their resonances, doubles, codings, and relays. But he also renders himself as the relay of these transferences, in the process expanding art’s premodern calling: to exist as an invocation. Reification suddenly appears as what is situated between embodiment and disembodiment, with both potentially destabilized. Some Monologues, the book, is this destabilization’s ideal format: as much documentation, an echo, of Coburn’s works through their scripts, as it is an instruction manual for denaturalizing our sense/s. — Kerstin Stakemeier

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. 

Meriem Bennani's Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.

This volume includes essays by Emily LaBarge and Elvia Wilk and transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and: Omar Berrada; Fatima Al Quadiri, Negar Azimi, and Tiffany Malakooti; Amal Benzekri; and Aziz Bouyabrine.

Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely.

Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is raucous, hilarious, irreverent, and wildly smart, taking aim at techno-salvation fantasies, startup culture, and the eternal humiliation of having a body under the ridiculous conditions of late capitalism. Finlay's new novel is as unexpected and unique as all of her work. Read it now.
— Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape 

'You don't need dysphoria to be trans. You don't need a body at all.’

When Sean Hastings, (the first) transgender private detective, is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin and bankrolled by VSI, a mysterious tech company.

At VSI, representation matters, which is why Taylor, the token QTPOC face, runs their latest project. Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world, while Casey, Sean’s ex, seeks Releasing as the latest Long Plague miracle cure. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears, and the plot thickens.

A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Natasha Stagg is the author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 and Surveys: A Novel, both published by Semiotext(e). Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Texte Zur Kunst, n+1, Spike Art, Flash Art, Dazed, V, Vice, 032c, and other publications.

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.