Quiet Fires

Taylor Johnson’s debut poetry collection, Inheritance, explores the complexities and limitations of language, physicality and capitalism. Resisting singularities, each poem emerges with a distinct sound, space and sensibility. Whether driving in a Lincoln Town Car; moving through pine forests and becoming immersed in the sounds of animals and nature; languishing in a lovers’ invitation, transcending from the syncopation of Go-go or walking the pavements of Washington D.C.—‘dissolving into sound’. Johnson’s critical perspective is rooted in connection. These poems gesture towards the tools we might need for living alongside rather than against or in spite of an inundation of daily oppressions. Be it redefining trans Blackness, environmental degradation, or land ownership and labour. With receptiveness and tenderness Johnson strolls around language, listening to silence—inheriting it, filling it and remaking it. 

Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.

The first book devoted to the late African American writer and actress, Dorothy Dean, one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday, close to Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This second release from Éditions 1989 features Dorothy Dean's unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. This volume also includes Dean's transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory actor, Ondine.

Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday.

Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Rachel Valinsky.

WARMAN SCHOOL: UNACCREDITED & PROUD documents 8 years of writing prompts, movement activities, research, and experiences from LA Warman’s iconic anti-school, Warman School. Over 1500 students have passed through the hallowed halls of a Warman School Zoom room; you can also attend school! The book describes lore surrounding the founding and growth of the school as well as advice on how not to make money. You can also be a self-directed student and follow prompts from the most popular courses at the school: death, loneliness, erotics, god, and poetry. Part workbook and part lousy advice column: this book gives you everything you need to learn!

LA Warman also unearths her fucked philosophies for you to judge. The book centers around the idea that all knowledge is already inside your body, and through movement and writing activities, you can begin to open up this abundance. LA gives away every prompt she has used in class and every lesson plan so you can do class in your own space and time. You are the teacher. You are the student. You are the school.

LA Warman is a poet, sound artist, and teacher based in New York City. Her most recent poetic novella, titled Dust was published in 2022 by Inpatient Press. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She founded Warman School, a non-accredited and body-based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 1500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement.  Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. Her work has been featured in media like Interview Magazine, Vulture, poem-a-day, Out Magazine, and Mousse Magazine.

A chronology of poems selected & translated by Robin Moger.

I had intended my poetry to be a kind of salvation for me in my confrontation with the onslaught of a perpetually antagonistic world. When this confrontation failed, I tried convincing myself that surrendering to the world—being a scrap of paper floating downriver—was the only salvation available to me. But this proved impossible, too.

Wadih Saadeh

In a 2014 AlMayadeen TV interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work ‘an autobiography of other people’s lives.’ At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six-year-old—very arguably the greatest living Arabic poet—did not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murray’s ‘All Writing is Autobiography’ is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be you—that feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is ‘a momentary, illusory cure’ from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to ‘the absent one,’ ‘a shadow self, the self that cannot be present.’ Summoning that inner absence, switching on the reader’s presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time. 

Youssef Rakha, 
from his Afterword, ‘The Australian’

Presence Detection System is a collection of presence detection systems written between 19015 and 19017 by my mother’s daughter. Its composition was marked by the many things we came to violently disagree about, and it was thought, back then, that an abandonment of comparison could be the only way out. For example, we disagreed and disagree about whether to call what we call ourselves ‘misprisions.’ We disagreed and disagree about where to drape our lone antimacassar, how to clean it, who made it, etc. We disagreed and disagree about what is and isn’t an instance of gambling, which itself is, my mother would joke, “a kind of wager labour.” We even disagreed and disagree about love, even though we experience it, talk about it, act upon it and theorize it in exactly the same way.

Nora Collen Fulton is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.