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Cover of The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker

Les Figues Press

The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker

Michael du Plessis

€20.00

JonBenet meets Kathy Acker in a rollicking coming-of-age tale set in the snow globe of Boulder, Colorado. With guest appearances by Little Lord Fauntleroy, H. P. Lovecraft, the Blue Fairy, a wind-up Walter Benjamin, a soft-toy Cthulhu, O (from Story of O), and many more. Neither tribute nor pastiche, The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker investigates the "self" of very-late-capitalism in a collage of all that is right, and terribly wrong, in America. 

The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker is published as part of the TrenchArt: Surplus Series, with an introduction by Peggy Kamuf and visual art by Klaus Killisch.

Michael du Plessis teaches Comparative Literature and English at the University of Southern California, where he is also completing a masters degree in Professional Writing. Du Plessis has written about a wide variety of subjects, from Goth culture to the French fin-de-siècle. He has also performed at Highways and at the MAK Center/Schindler House, amongst other venues.

Published in 2012 ┊ 98 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Inch Aeons

Les Figues Press

Inch Aeons

Nuala Archer

Poetry €20.00

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.

Cover of Cunt Norton

Les Figues Press

Cunt Norton

Dodie Bellamy

Fiction €20.00

In Cunt Norton, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy "cunts" The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature.

The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems ("the greatest fuck poem in the English language," according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. "These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well," Bellamy writes. Even as Cunt Norton dismembers the history of English poetry, "cunting" Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy's cunted texts breathe life into literary "masters" with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion. 

Cover of Grammar of the Cage

Les Figues Press

Grammar of the Cage

Pam Ore

Poetry €20.00

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."

Cover of +|'me'S-pace

Les Figues Press

+|'me'S-pace

Christine Wertheim

Poetry €20.00

+|`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.

Cover of Acker

Nightboat Books

Acker

Douglas A. Martin

Essays €18.00

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

A cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

Cover of Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition

Graywolf Press

Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition

Paul B. Preciado

Essays €22.00

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

Cover of Eat Your Mind (paperback)

Simon & Schuster

Eat Your Mind (paperback)

Jason McBride

Biography €20.00

The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature.

Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School ; Empire of the Senses ; and Pussy, King of Pirates , Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution.

She was notorious for her methods—collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critique—as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits, she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.

Cover of Margery Kempe

New York Review of Books

Margery Kempe

Robert Glück

Fiction €17.00

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."