The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in.

It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage.

Translated by Susan de Muth, preface by Pierre Mac Orlan, essay by Amelia Groom.

This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein’s career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.

Benjamin Krusling's Glaring is the winner of our 2019 Open Reading Period, and was selected by guest judge Lucy Ives.

In 1971, the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris. The magazine—a whisper on the literary landscape that appeared three years after Boulus’s arrival in the US—brings together work by Boulus and several of his literary friends, in translation by Boulus and Etel Adnan.

Tigris was not an end in itself, but rather a temporary solution to the lifelong problem of how to devote oneself to poetry across different countries, eras, and styles: how to live poetry. Yet, in so doing, the small anthology includes significant work: Etel Adnan’s “Jebu,” translated by Adnan, and poetry by Boulus, Fouad Rifkah, Yusuf al-Khal, Mouayad al-Rawi, and Riadh Fakhouri, all in Boulus’s translations, as well as a work by Ankido, a “street-activist poet-café worker of importance to the Palestinian Liberation Movement.”

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

In Bewogen selfies onderzoekt Obe Alkema de verhouding tussen landschap en herinnering. Wat treft hij aan bij terugkeer naar belangrijke plaatsen uit zijn geheugen? Wat herinnert hij zich niet, maar Google wel? Is er een gedenkschrift te puren uit zijn metadata?

Memoires, rechtstreeks verteld en met omwegen, uit eerste hand en van horen zeggen. Archieven en herinneringen eisen spreektijd, houden het niet meer droog of worden tot spreken gebracht. Wat hebben ze eigenlijk te melden? Ze lopen helemaal leeg, net als Alkema zelf. Een leven zoals zovele, poedelnaakt en geretoucheerd, vol zin en onzin.

"Marie’s fragrance, smashed out of the bottle for another breath. We should always doubt that the air is pure. We should always doubt that the air is not." 
–Alexandre Curlet

Includes an excerpt from Josh Barber's "Omnipotence".
Published as part of Paraphernalia and Addenda 2.2 of Tabloid Publications.

In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.

“I wanna ____ all my friends at once”: how would you complete the lyric Arthur Russell wrote for “Go Bang”? In Rainer Diana Hamilton’s hands, “smell” or “touch”—or “talk to,” for Hamilton a near-synonym for “love”—might be more appropriate than Russell’s “see.” Or maybe they’ll have argued us into believing that yet a different faculty counts among the senses, in these poem-essays that swerve from memory to love letter to argument. A narrative of lost and developed capacities, a felt history of class antagonism, a treatise masquerading as a flower, a flower in every organ—Lilacs is rude with ambition, underneath its abundant charm.” —Kay Gabriel

“Every new poem by Rainer Diana Hamilton is a gift in which poetry is made new again.” —Andrew Durbin