Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Saborami: Expanded facsimile edition

Book Works

Saborami: Expanded facsimile edition

Cecilia Vicuña

€25.00

Cecilia Vicuña created Saborami in the aftermath of the September 1973 military coup in Chile. Combining poetry, journal entries, documentation of artworks including assemblages and paintings, the book was published in Devon, England in an edition of 250 hand-made copies by the artist-led Beau Geste Press. It was one of the first artistic responses to the violence of the fascist junta.

In recent years, Vicuña has gained increasing renown, including a retrospective at Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With, 2019) and installations at the Guggenheim (2022); and Tate Modern (2023). Saborami is one of her most important works, made at a turning point in her life and career, and reverberating through to the present day. Though the book is highly regarded, it has also been hard to access. This new, expanded facsimile edition remedies this oversight, and restates Saborami as a central example of artistic engagement in material and revolutionary resistance.

Engaging obliquely with the legacies of surrealism, contemporaneous experiments in concrete poetry and the British conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, Saborami is part of an exilic and internationalist tradition. Years ahead of her time, Vicuña outlines an eco-socialist and feminist vision in the face of defeat.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s original publication and of the coup in Chile, this expanded edition contains a new introduction by art historian and curator Amy Tobin and poet and writer Luke Roberts. It includes rarely seen archival material from Vicuña’s time in London, such as contributions to the feminist newspaper Spare Rib, commentary from BBC coverage, and her role in Artists for Democracy in Chile and other solidarity campaigns.

Published in 2024 ┊ 224 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña

Kelsey Street Press

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña

Poetry €40.00

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other. In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Kelsey Street Press, 2018), SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.

Cover of Deer Book/Libro Venado

Radius Books

Deer Book/Libro Venado

Cecilia Vicuña

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

Cover of Jungle

studio saudari

Jungle

Gabriella Achadinha

Jungle, (the latest 2025 self-published zine offering from studio saudari), delves into The Socio-Political, The Pitfalls of Neoliberalism, Circus State, Environmental Collapse, Heterotopias & Growth ~ Decay. 
Referencing Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905), this print issue aims to combine various interpretations of The Jungle as a site of critique, of contention, of potential growth.

Contributors:
y3000w, Video Club, Fred Horton, Jordan Ossermann, Tristac Gac, Tom Hegen, Santiago Barragán, Anu Jakobson, Camille Theodet, George Nebieridze, Mu Pan, Robert Zhao Renhui, Thérèse Rafter, Cecilia Vicuña, Dani Santander Villarroel, Adam Call Roberts, Dr. Sönke Johnsen, Elena Zaghis, Miguel Garchitorena, Amanda Nell Eu, Mishka Mahomed, Dani Kyengo O'Neill / BŪJIN, Erin Jane Nelson, Mariana E. Rivas Salazar, Kim Rosario, Rachel Lamot, Marion Post Wolcott, Madina Mahomedova.

Designed by Felicia Usinto & Sera van de Water

Cover of Bodies Found in Various Places

Cardboard House Press

Bodies Found in Various Places

Elvira Hernández, Daniel Borzutzky and 1 more

Poetry €24.00

The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.

"Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life."— Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple

Cover of Curious Affinities

Hajar Press

Curious Affinities

Sophie Chauhan

Poetry €18.00

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Curious Affinities unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

In rousing poetry and incisive prose, Sophie Chauhan reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life and wonders how they might be reimagined.

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converge around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

Cover of The Error is Regretted

The Green Box

The Error is Regretted

Anita Di Bianco

‘Corrections and Clarifications’ is an ongoing newsprint project by Anita Di Bianco, an edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions, and apologies to print news from September 2001 to the present. In essence, a reverse chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, tangled catchphrases, and patterns of misspeak and inflection.

Previous editions have examined the printed news media in the United States and United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and other international press from Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans printed in English. The publication includes text contributions by Di Bianco and Francesco Gagliardi.

108 p, ills bw, 24 x 32 cm, hb, German/English

Cover of The Undying (paperback)

Picador

The Undying (paperback)

Anne Boyer

Poetry €20.00

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 2020; Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction 2020

Cover of Metal Works

Lenz Press

Metal Works

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

Cover of in the coherence, we weep

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

in the coherence, we weep

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

“in the coherence, we weep is both an artist book and an exhibition. The project is about the critical potential of incoherencies. It is an attempt to map methodology across media, while welcoming glitches that allow for moments of critical self-reflection and knowledge production. Developed in parallel, the book and exhibition critically reflect on each other’s approaches. It looks at strategies for how text can be alive and vibrant across various architectural contexts as well as those used in the artist’s family archive, particularly annotation, redaction, indexing, blurring, and learning through reading and writing.” - KW Institute for Contemporary Art

“Multilayering was in that sense an important aspect, which got translated with the material and the design by choosing papers with differents gradients of transparency, as well as interfering and overlapping text layouts. We also designed the cover with a blue scratch off drawing on top of another artwork, so every book might change a bit over time depending on the use. This reflects the artist‘s idea of including the audience and an ever changing oeuvre, where the relation between pieces become important too.” - Studio Pandan

Texts by Dr. Christina Landbrecht, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Sofie Krogh Christensen, Chang Yuchen, Ladi'Sasha Jones

This artist book is published on the occasion of Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2022 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2023).