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

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer's durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary —and often unheralded— contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory "an emotional science project," but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet's eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is —as she says— "always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show."

This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.

Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.

They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."

Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021

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.

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.

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

The Book of Skies, like its predecessor Excess-The Factory, emerged from poet Leslie Kaplan's experience participating in the national strike and social revolution of ’68 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory, puts the factory experience strikingly on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the poem’s speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

From the beginning of her career, French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L'exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the book’s first translation into English, though it had been translated into five other languages.

The Whisper is Félicia Atkinson's new artist's book, bringing together photographs, drawings and poems. They revolve around the eponymous installation located on the pointe d'Agon, on the west coast in Normandy. On a dune acquired by the artist for the Conservatoire du Littoral, stands a pierced wooden sculpture. Around this sculpture, inside this wild dune and facing the sea, the walker is invited to become a whisperer, and listen to what surrounds him. 

What if whispering could be a metaphor for a way of creating and living within biodiversity? Observing and listening, being present to the world while only leaving gentle trace? The studio then becomes a garden, the exhibition space a dune, deep listening a method of working and exchanging with the public and the reader.

Experimental musician, sound and visual artist Félicia Atkinson (born 1981) lives on the wild coast of Normandy (France). She has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. 
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.