Books

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism.

Lingua Press, 1976

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

An inscription of time at the coast, singing crows, albatrosses and seagulls. STOP. Extracted from the earth a whole alphabet. The waves uplifted countries and washed mountains until the storm came undone. The plantation of tobacco was maintained among the meadows and cafes flourished as the core of erudition, the power was theirs - you could see it in cinema- the actors spoke feverishly with enthusiasm, rather than breathless, meticulous and austere. The scars healed on mysterious skin that came out of the shadow to cross the day.

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Ce jeu memory invite à découvrir la symbolique de l’ours à travers l’Histoire, et plus précisément à travers l’histoire de l’ours en peluche. L’animal n’a pas toujours eu bonne réputation chez les humains. Comment un jouet à son effigie a-t-il pu devenir un emblème de l’enfance ? Le jeu se compose de 54 cartes numérotées (27 paires) et d’un poster explicatif imprimés en risographie. 

This game of memory is an invitation to discover the symbolism of the bear through history, more specifically, through the history of the teddy bear. The animal didn’t always have such a good reputation among humans. How could a toy in his likeness become an emblem of childhood ? The game is made of 54 numbered cards (27 pairs), and an explanatory poster printed in risography.

PRESCRIPTIONS is a transcription of a handwritten manuscript, dated to approximately 1650, containing a wide range of medicinal and magical remedies. Currently housed in the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection, it is assumed this practical handbook was a reference for healing, midwifery, and other medical/magical advice. Recipes and instruction cover various methods of purging, ointments for swellings, fevers, and pain reduction, lotions for venereal disease, advice for childbirth, and dilemmas such as “worms in the ear.” Accompanying these medicinal prescriptions are a series of magical prescriptions: charms, rituals, and spells recorded to fortify the ailing body, induce amorous desire, or seek revenge.

With its mix of Latin words, Early Modern English parlance, colloquial plant names, apothecary weights, and archaic medical terms, the recipes can at first appear opaque, but with sustained engagement one can begin to decipher the logics and structures within the writer(s)' shorthand. The original manuscript, in having its own detailed glossary, index, and citations, exhibits a meticulous cataloging of knowledge and resources, and reveals an earnest desire to hold onto the integrity and sanctity of the body in the face of 'many evils.'

The transcription is accompanied by a glossary of terms, an explanation of the various apothecary measurements used, and expanded citations of the medicinal/magical treatises that were abbreviated within the original text.

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.

Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.

Help brilliantly extends Steven Zultanski’s current phase of writing—looser, more documentary, more situational. In setting up explicit objects of inquiry and conversation—love, death, childhood—the book shows that to know these things is to also know our friends and ourselves. Sustained by an orchestration of relation and memory (and thus reality), affect here is modular, the product of what happens when we transform things by talking about them. A careful and astute experiment in writing and living.
 — Jennifer Soong

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.

"A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked." — Boštjan Videmšek

"Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene." — Chris Kraus

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.

L'édition inédite et définitive (établie à partir des tapuscrits originaux en français) du traité fabuleux du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Un monstre venu des profondeurs de l'océan, un poulpe vampire. Sa violence rappelle les nazis, ses mœurs sont libertaires et libidineuses. C'est une créature infernale, cannibale et brutale, pouvant changer de couleur à volonté, et dotée de trois pénis.
Et c'est notre cousin.

Dans cette fable fantastique, Vampyroteuthis infernalis émerge, non des abysses de l'océan, mais du plus profond de nous-mêmes pour nous tendre un miroir, nous montrer à quel point nous, les hommes, sommes ses proches parents et que nos histoires, nos sociétés, nos modes de vie ne sont, au fond, pas si différents.
Ce texte délibérément provocateur du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) n'est ni scientifique, ni objectif : c'est une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Flusser avait écrit ce texte en français (outre des versions en allemand et en portugais), et ce livre est la première édition du texte original en français. Il est accompagné des fantastiques dessins de son ami l'artiste et « zoosystémicien » français Louis Bec (1936-2018), co-auteur du livre, traduisant en images pseudo-scientifiques les chimères vampyroteuthiques.

Des essais de Marc Lenot, Élise Rigot et Florent Barrère éclairent la démarche de Flusser et de Bec.

Afternoon Editions no. 0: List of books in the library of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. The list consists of books that have been leart by heart within the project (by heart library), an incomplete list of books that were considered to be leart by heart, that played an important role in the process of choice, or that have been considered to be learnt by heart in the future (shadow library), a growing collection of literature, publications, essays, films, ephemera relating to interests within the project (reference library).

Edition last updated May 2020.

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

• Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
• Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
• Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
• Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
• Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
• Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
• Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
• Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
• Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
• Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
• Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard

Sands Murray-Wassink (b. 1974, Topeka, Kansas) is a painter, writer, and performance artist based in Amsterdam. A long-overlooked cult figure in the city’s art scene, his work spans decades, touching on themes of gender, desire, intimacy, mental health, and self-exploration. Deeply influenced by intersectional feminism and queer theory, his practice revolves around, and is shaped by figures such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, and Eva Hesse.

Since 2014, Sands has predominantly focused on what he calls “Horse Drawings,” utilizing mostly watercolors and often incorporating quickly drawn texts, on A4 and A3 formats, both on white, colored paper and found material such as newspapers. These drawings, while sometimes devoid of actual horse imagery, all bear the title and embody the spirit of equine grace, symbolizing a personal journey towards healing. The horse, a figure the artist was once restricted from engaging with by his grandfather due to its perceived femininity, has evolved in his work as an emblem of transformation and healing. The book includes a broad selection of over 700 drawings printed in full color, and the short text Investment by Sands. 

The contents of Reading Like a Computer. A Sematic Guide to Facebook's Content Moderation Policies are from leaked PowerPoint slides used to train Facebook content moderators. The contents have not been embellished or editorialized. By organizing and graphically presenting the subtle discrepancies between what Facebook allows and doesn’t allow in a post, the book highlights the contradictions and challenging logic of Facebook's community standards.

"Camp is a master of turning the colloquial idiom into whimsical sardonic humor" — Library Journal 

"Camp comes off as a kind of modem day, tongue-in-cheeck Shakespeare. And that, though hardly carnal, is refreshing" — Raymond DiZazzo 

"Camp's first full-length solo collection is a welcome and well-made addition to Burning Deck's amazing list. The poems and songs are lively and very often funny, but not always as light as might appear on the surface.... There is an obvious command of the traditions he employs, allowing him to turn lament into satire" — Bruce McPherson 

Nowhere Near follows the author’s psychogeographic journey from Los Angeles to Pangasinan to Mexico City after his departure from the United States, where he lived undocumented for twenty-six years. Returning to the Philippines with his grandmother to search for lost land and to confront a “family curse,” Revereza surfaces legacies of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism as they bear out in its continued present. Through film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative, Nowhere Near excavates the amnesias and silences that shape personal and historical memory in the exilic, diasporic impasse.

Miko Revereza's Nowhere Near is the 2021 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge John Keene.

About the author

Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFI’s Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, London. 

Praise

In his powerful and entrancing voice, fueled by irony and critique, Miko Revereza explores neoliberal capitalism, the challenges facing undocumented families, the non-existent “American dream,” and internal and external exile, showing how borders of all kinds (geographical, racial, psychic), though regularly traversed, are policed and criminalized. Nowhere Near is a cri de coeur about twenty-first century American society.
—John Keene

Miko Revereza’s captivating book is a companion to his diaristic 2023 feature of the same title, and it is a pleasure to encounter on the page the resonant literary voice he developed while making that film. Befitting its rich entwining of personal and political histories, Nowhere Near contains a wondrous range of modes and moods: raw and revealing one moment, sharply and humorously observant the next, by turns poetic and plainspoken.  
—Dennis Lim

Nowhere Near is a document of lives lived undocumented. Here, form matters: text branches out from image, while dialogue counterpoints an easy, self-reflexive poetic. With the acuity necessitated by a status requiring constant vigilance, negotiating the privatized avenues of America’s dream, Revereza’s words carry a weight that belies their simplicity. Here and now, our attention matters, as America’s icy grip chills us all.
—Alia Syed

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

A comprehensive overview of the unique work of the Italian artist born in 1931 and "discovered" late on the international scene, with numerous texts and an interview.

Published after the eponymous exhibition at Consortium Museum, Dijon, April 26th – September 8th 2024.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1931, Isabella Ducrot is a young artist with a young career. Like many women of her generation, she moved into art after raising her children. Her formative years were marked by continuous travels with her late husband, during which they amassed hundreds of Persian miniatures and rare antique textiles of many kinds.

Contributions by Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim, Verena Lueken, Tobias Pils, Tschabalala Self, Andrea Viliani, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta’s 4th monograph, Iman Mersal navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.

Text: Iman Mersal
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
Co-publishers: Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press
Design: Julie Peeters
Size: 9.6 x 14.8 cm
Pages: 168 pages, Soft cover