Books

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

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.

This publication presents research conducted by visual artist and choreographer Clarissa Bauman over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Here, writing becomes movement, a weaving of words, gestures, images, and drawings that rub against each other in a dialogue articulated from page to page.

"The choreography of small, overlooked gestures from moments of boredom, letting loose, detours. The finger sliding along the table, the arm coinciding with the back of this wooden chair. The coincidence of a gesture with an image, and the instantaneous disparition of this image in the body, as it transforms into the sketch of another movement. Contours, strokes, perspective lines, everything sinuous, asking at what moment does the image appear, emerge, and then become undone? The impossibility, within the body, of an image being fixed, still, one. (…) At this point in the writing, I perceive text less as a desire to organise, sediment, or give form to something, whatever it might be, but rather as a desire to find the outlines of connections between materials left hanging in the room I share with them, the tight space around the table, the images pinned to the walls in front of and behind me, the markings layered, scratched, or sketched in notebooks, the pages from books insistently revisited these last months, the memories that wane, escape, or insinuate themselves between these spaces. Developing a strategy for distracted observation."

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. 

With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation—which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"—also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. 

Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

Adrenalin is Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation by Catherine Cobham comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.

In this psychoanalytic pamphlet, Croatian philosopher Karlo Pavlović analyses the perversions of the day. Considering the topic of ASMR, a key example of what he calls the generalised deployment of subtle pornography, of depictions of sexuality "in gloves", he argues that society today should be understood through the blue balls phenomenon. This concept, developed playfully by Pavlović, explains that we are all perverts taking the logic of the drive to its extreme; if the whole point of the drive is not to attain its object, but rather, to circle around it, the perverse subject (as the subject of the present times) has, in fact, no problems with this whatsoever.

Karlo Pavlović is completing his PhD in Philosophy at The University of Ljubljana, supervised by Alenka Zupančič.

Born in Beirut, Ali Cherri lives and works between Beirut and Paris. He belongs to this generation of Lebanese artists born during the civil war whose work has been strongly affected by this context of instability.

Through an introduction by the artist, 4 essays and an interview, this first monograph reveals the political, aesthetic and dreamlike dimensions of a work that the artist has been developing for over fifteen years. Ali Cherri's interdisciplinary work explores the myths and classifications of ancient worlds and contemporary societies

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

The “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press, that federated visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement from 1971 to 1976.

The independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists' couple Martha Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children, they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside, where, joined by a group of friends including the artist and art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed 'a community of duplicators, printers, and artisans'.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition artists' books, it published the work of its own members, but also that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing to distribution, under the same—bucolic—roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of its generation.

Published by the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, this reference book surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the publications of its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, David Mayor and Chris Welch, and of the numerous visitors to its rural outpost from 1971 to 1976. A “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by BGP, it is complemented by critical essays and first-hand texts that explore the working methods (economy and autonomy of production, distribution of books via post) and document the international influence of this short-lived “community of duplicators, printers, and artisans”.

Essays by Karen Di Franco, Zanna Gilbert, Polly Gregson, Carmen Juliá, Alice Motard, Mila Waldeck ; original texts by Allen Fisher, Mike Leggett, Clive Phillpot, Cecilia Vicuña.

Editions by Claudio Bertoni, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, GJ de Rook, Felipe Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Yaël Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Ken Friedman, Mick Gibbs, Klaus Groh, Kristján Guðmundsson, Mary Harding, Woody Haut, Jan Hendrix, Jarosław Kozłowski, Myra Landau, Michael Leggett, Rafael López, Raúl Marroquin, Pepe Maya, David Mayor, Anthony McCall, Victor Musgrave, Opal L. Nations, Colin Naylor, Michael Nyman, Ryo & Hiroko Koike, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Sitting Dog & Co, Endre Tót, Yukio Tsuchiya, Ben Vautier, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Welch, Hideki Yoshida...

Each book is accompanied by five unprecedented bookmarks.

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

From its situation in Ancient Greece through the various rewritings and commentaries and interventions of the last 2500 years, there is certainly no book being transmitted in the anything-but-unbroken and often comic transmission of The Phaenomena, a long didactic poem enumerating the constellations and their movement through the skies. There is certainly no origin apparent in such a transmission, even as the layers of compaction that this text attempts to unfold are themselves arguments about origin, plaintive debates about the irresolvable contradiction of a “first copier.” But what does it mean to give up the constellation, the relation, the durability that relation promises to guarantee, without being able to retreat into the security of origin or determinate meaning? What do you do then? This is to rephrase the question: what do we – “we,” obstinately – fail to see when we see the shapes of the stars so well?

Thee Display is a collection of poems written during an engagement with this ongoing transmission. It is a book about this, and a book about the horizon of communism, and a book about transition, and a book about a companionship characterized by a weird and sad kind of cheer.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. Thee Display is her third book of poetry - she is also the author of Presence Detection System, from Hiding Press (2019), and Life Experience Coolant, from Bookthug (2013). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

Resistance dispatch 002

In 2024, the documentary No Other Land, co-produced by Palestinian and Jewish activists from Masafer Yatta drew internattional attention at film festivals, bringing the long-standing occupation, demolitions, and violence in the region into broader public view. 

The starting point of this publication emerged from an impromptu decision to draw a family tree covering roughly five hundred villagers of Umm al-Kheir. The author follows two threads simultaneously: one traces verifiable institutional and geographic transformations, tracking how a community is systematically rendered illegal through planning regimes and court rulings; the other comes from lived encounters, oral testimony, and the moments when people entrusted me with their names, their kinship ties, and their past.

Printed by Bleed Print

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts.

The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous.

The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

A journey through the artist's work and life.

William Anastasi is the author of a prolific body of work. A major figure in conceptualism and in many respects one of its initiators, his trajectory cannot be solely confined to this chapter in the history of contemporary art. The book revisits, through the prism of multiple voices, the various aspects of an approach that unfolded with the use of complementary mediums. Drawing coexists with photography and "new" technologies, alongside objects, paintings, and installations. Within this corpus to be (re)discovered, sounds, images, and language, as well as artifacts, protocols, and processes, convey inquiries related to space and time, representation, and perception. With contributions from Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen.

Edited by Erik Verhagen.
Texts by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, Erik Verhagen.

The new “left-wing Catholics”; education under Trump and the American brain drain; theater, porn, and bullfighting with Lorraine de Sagazan; an X-ray journey with the nuclear nomads; soccer, Gen Z, and algorithmic governance in Morocco; Pedro Rhino, cinema at the end of the neocolonial mirage...

Founded in 1995, Mouvement is a French “indisciplinary cultural magazine”, published quaterly.

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

13 poems of various length.

"I have used a procedure to write them and I am happy to share it, but it isn't what's most important about these poems. The subject matter that, I eventually realised, they share to the extent of justifying bundling them up in one pamphlet is religiosity, what stands between belief and act, be it faith or trust."

The new edition of Salinger's ever-relevant series of 1980s and '90s teenagers in their bedrooms. 

Bedrooms contain the past, the present and the future; they are sites of continual transformation. Popular culture and fashion continually change and recycle. While specific objects of decor change over time, teenagers' bedrooms are still private sanctuaries: spaces for safely experimenting during a time in life when one is forming and expressing ever-evolving identities.

Upon its release in 1995, Adrienne Salinger's book In My Room was an immediate success, selling nearly 24,000 copies in its first few years. The continued popularity of this work made in the '80s and '90s is curious. However, over the nearly 30 years since, and especially in the most recent decade of social media, the work's appeal has grown tremendously. In some cases, the work evokes nostalgia, but not primarily so. Adrienne Salinger hears from current teenagers often; many send her pictures of their bedrooms today. Social media encourages users to endlessly "rebrand" their identities, creating idealized fantasies, striving for perfection. These photographs are not about perfection. They give voice to the contradictions of our identities.

Hundreds of print and online articles, interviews and features on In My Room have been published and the work has been exhibited at museums all around the world. Long out of print and now considered a classic, with only a rare few available on the secondary market, the book returns in a new expanded edition as Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. With 26 additional photographs, this treasure is made available once more to new audiences.

Adrienne Salinger has published three photobooks: In My Room (1995), Living Solo (1999) and Middle Aged Men (2007). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico.

Bricks from the Kiln is an irregular journal edited by Andrew Lister and Matthew Stuart, sometimes with guest editors, that presents graphic design and typography as disciplines activated by and through other disciplines and lenses such as language, archives, collage, and more. It borrows its title from the glossary notes of Ret Marut’s "Der Ziegelbrenner," which was the ‘size, shape and colour of a brick’, and ran for 13 issues between 1917 and 1921.

The latest installment, "#4: On Translation, Transmission & Transposition," was published as an event (and now) a publication, with events at London College of Communication, Burley Fisher Books & Pig Rock bothy, Socttish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Inga (in November, 2019).

GREENING
Helen Marten
(front / back flaps)

JOY & HAPPINESS, FIDELITY
& INTIMACY IN TRANSLATION
Sophie Collins
(pp.4–13)

PLANETARY TRANSLATION
Don Mee Choi
(pp.15–19)

TRANSLATION AND A LIPOGRAM:
OR, ON FORMS OF AGAIN-WRITING
AND NO- (OR NOT THAT-) WRITING
Kate Briggs
(pp.23–33)

UNHOMING (1 of 4):
FOLLOWING HÖLDERLIN’S ‘HEIMAT’
Phil Baber
(pp.35–47)

SNOW WHITE AND THE WHITE
OF THE HUMAN EYEBALLS
Joyce Dixon
(pp.51–62)

ALTAMIRALTAMIRALTAMIRA
Florian Roithmayr
(pp.65–116)

LEVEL UP, LEVEL DOWN
Jen Calleja
(pp.119–124)

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]:
A JAVASCRIPT FOR THREE VOICES
J.R. Carpenter
(pp.127–134)

THE MECHANISATION OF ART
Edgar Wind
(glosses / annotations / insertions by
Natalie Ferris & Bryony Quinn)
(pp.137–144)

UNHOMING (2 of 4)
Phil Baber
(p.147)

COMMISSION FOR A NOIR MOVIE
B IN THE BAY OF BISCAY
Rebecca Collins
(pp.151–157)

UNHOMING (3 of 4)
Phil Baber
(pp.150–162)

EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE;
TRANSCRIBING OSTEON
Naomi Pearce
(pp.165–170)

HOW DOES A WORK END?
Karen Di Franco
(pp.173–193)

METONYMY Op.1 & Op.2
James Bulley
(pp.197–201)

AFRIKAN ALPHABETS EXTENDED
Saki Mafundikwa
(pp.204–207)

SUSAN HILLER: 1983
Natalie Ferris
(pp.209–217)

EVERY TELLING HAS A TALING /
EVERY STORY HAS AN ENDING
Matthew Stuart
(pp.220–233)

GRAPHIC PROPRIOCEPTION
James Langdon
(pp.235–254)

UNHOMING (4 of 4)
Phil Baber
(pp.257–263)

TUNNELLING AND AGGREGATING
FOR DESIGN RESEARCH
Bryony Quinn (text) &
Peter Nencini (images)
(pp.265–272)

LET IT PERCOLATE:
A MANIFESTO FOR READING
Sophie Seita
(pp.275–280)

288 pgs, 22.4 × 17 cm, Softcover, 2020

Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

Introduction by Elvia Wilk. Contributions by Yu Araki, A.E. Benenson, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sven Lütticken, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spyros Papapetros, Camille Richert, Théo Robine-Langlois, Ian Wallace, and Michelle Wun Ting Wong.

Tyler’s scripts refuse to fix an authorial voice; instead, they make the conditions of authorship itself their subject. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and document, the human and the bureaucratic, the self and its doubles, his work thinks through systems from the inside, often using language as both architecture and trap. In their precision and porousness, I recognize a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy. — Jill Magid

In Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues, a binary that remains constitutive for the ideological continuity of modern life, in all its colonial and capital forms, is undone: digital vs. physical. In troubling that chasm, Coburn plays out the repercussions of these ideologies of anthropomorphic naturalism, guiding us through their resonances, doubles, codings, and relays. But he also renders himself as the relay of these transferences, in the process expanding art’s premodern calling: to exist as an invocation. Reification suddenly appears as what is situated between embodiment and disembodiment, with both potentially destabilized. Some Monologues, the book, is this destabilization’s ideal format: as much documentation, an echo, of Coburn’s works through their scripts, as it is an instruction manual for denaturalizing our sense/s. — Kerstin Stakemeier

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich.