Books

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew on the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that both embrace and resist tradition. Anjuman grew up in the Herat, Afghanistan, a city known for centuries for its poetry. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in what appeared to be a needlepoint school, one of the few sanctioned pastimes for women, to secretly discuss literature and poetry. After the fall of the Taliban, Anjuman was finally able to attend university. She wrote and published a celebrated volume of poetry and was set to publish another before her early death due to domestic violence. Selections from both of Anjuman’s collections are presented here for the first time in English.

A collection of texts by fifteen contemporary Brazilian authors who approach the notions of care and privilege from a transfeminist, anti-racist and decolonialcritical perspective.

Edited by Diane Lima, Cíntia Guedes, abigail Campos Leal.

Texts by Ricardo Aleixo, Pacha Ana, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Monna Brutal, Rebeca Carapiá, Pêdra Costa, Ingrid Martins, muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi, Jota Mombaça, tatiana nascimento, Elton Panamby, Grace Passô, Miro Spinelli, Preto Téo, Lucas Veiga.

Translated from the Portuguese (Brasil) by Luana Almeida, Valentina D'Avenia, Léa Meier, aurore/a zachayus.

Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

The appearance of Firespitter (Nightboat, 2025), a 600-page-plus collected poems, is immensely valuable and long overdue . . . Hers [Jayne Cortez’s] is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives. - David Grundy, Poetry Foundation

The flag bearing twelve yellow stars on a blue background has become Europe’s most recognisable symbol. Since its introduction by the Council of Europe in 1955, it has stood for the unification of Europe’s nation states. It was precisely this yellow circle of stars that prevailed over more than 150 flag ideas sent to the Council of Europe by a host of diverse private individuals. These colourful designs are being now published in Rejected for the first time. They document the continent’s zeitgeist at a decisive period in the development of European unity. Alongside the flag proposals, the trilingual book (English, German, French) features a written contribution by the German-French poet and writer Marie Rotkopf, who tackles the EU’s neoliberal political cynicism and Germany’s expansion of power with biting irony.

Two Revolutions a Day marks the first in-depth publication devoted to the work of Sophie Nys, whose artistic practice over the past two decades has unfolded through an enterprising interplay of research, observation, and formal experimentation. Moving between exhibition-making, design, and subtle acts of re-framing, Nys has developed an oeuvre that resists fixed categories while remaining acutely attentive to the structures – historical, linguistic, psychological – that shape how meaning is produced and circulated.

Rather than presenting a linear retrospective, Two Revolutions a Day is organised as an extended conversation between Nys and critic Christophe Van Gerrewey that mirrors the artist’s own methods. Together, they revisit key works and exhibitions from the early 2000s to today, tracing recurring motifs and questions while allowing contradictions and shifts in perspective to remain visible.

Throughout the book, Nys’s fascination with systems of power and authority intersects with a sensitivity to intimacy, subjectivity, and the everyday, engaging with feminist perspectives that examine the politics of representation. Historical figures, marginal anecdotes, and overlooked documents appear alongside reflections on resistance, collaboration, design, and the conditions under which artworks –and the social roles they inhabit – come into being. Language, in particular, emerges as both material and problem: a tool that promises clarity while constantly slipping, misfiring, or revealing its own limits.

The 2025 Ringier annual report (artist's book).

Since 1998, Ringier, the Swiss-based global media company, has traditionally commissioned an artist to design its annual report. Publisher Michael Ringier and curator Beatrix Ruf initiated this series as a means of reinforcing the links between art and the activities of the company.

For the 2025 edition, Slavs and Tatars' Simurgh Self-Help revisits Marcel Broodthaers' seminal work Musée d'Art Moderne: Département des Aigles (1968–1972), replacing or "translating" the eagle—a symbol of power and empire that is used to challenge our understanding of authority and value—with the Simurgh, a mythical bird found across the Turkic-Persianate world. Whilst the eagle is often associated with nation-states and masculinity, the Simurgh is decidedly transnational, metaphysical, and flamboyant, if not gender-fluid.

Much like the collective's geographic remit—between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China—this publication attempts to shift our focus elsewhere, eastwards, to regions which too often fall through the cracks of historiography and art history. If modern and contemporary art institutions in Broodthaers' time were largely situated between the Rhineland and Northeast United States, the multipolarity of today's art world is a fait accompli: with biennials in Uzbekistan and museums in Kazakhstan, amongst others, rivalling the traditional centers of power.

Once too a sacred bird—accompanying Zeus, for example—the eagle has, over the past two millennia, undergone a thorough profanation: a brawny, secular flex of nationalism. It would be remiss not to see the parallels in the world of media: print itself and the act of reading, once an activity for the few and anointed, has undergone a similar dynamic of democratization over the past several centuries and, especially in recent years with the internet, a vulgarization which would make medieval Church elders wag their shriveled fingers at us in an I-told-you-so meme meant for the ages. This profanation has challenged the very institution of media and the narratives it disseminates, much as important works of institutional critique challenged contemporary art in the 1970s and beyond—akin to Slavs and Tatars' genre-bending mix of high and low, East and West, sacred and profane does today.

Slavs and Tatars' (founded 2006) extensive publishing activity—some 15 books in 20 years—has treated subjects as diverse as alphabet politics, Uighur literary culture, political satire in the Muslim world, and German anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Alongside sculptures, textile works, installations, sound pieces, and even a brick-and-mortar Pickle Bar in Berlin, the collective's books have cleared new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production that draws on popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective's work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. 

Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus, Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010) and are currently preparing solo engagements at Vienna's Secession,  Museum of Modern Art, New York and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Cult novelist Dennis Cooper launches the third title of Little House on the Bowery, the Akashic series he is editing and promoting. 

Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, from one of Canada’s most important young writers. Both books are set in the same small rural city, in different eras (1950s, 1930s), each characterized by McCormack’s spare and elliptical prose.

Peach machine comprises nine months of poems, tracing a recurrent cycle of sickness, heartbreak, reparation, and recovery from late summer back into early Spring. The work is roughshod: grieving, oxygen-starved, jetlagged, reflective, and relieved.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

Five dance pieces and an iconographic imaginary in convulsion: making the most of these ingredients, Alexandra Balona engages with the work of Cabo Verdean choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas.

This book offers a lens onto the dazzling oeuvre of a choreographer whose boldness shakes the foundations of every theater she enters. It centers on five emblematic works: Guintche (2010), Paradise—Private Collection (2012), Jaguar (2015), Bacchae—Prelude to a Purge (2017), and Mal—Embriaguez Divina (2020). It follows Monteiro Freitas's creative methodology, weaving references from her personal archive together with works from art history, navigating between ideas and possibilities in the manner of an atlas bearing the weight of the world. From wonder emerges a mode of attentive reading; one capable of observing and, out of fragments, revealing the methods, processes, and mechanisms of art. The texts in this book are "small critical machines for reading the unreadable."

Troubling the Stage: The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas is both a study and an encounter; a powerful crossing of choreography with critical thought. It invites readers, scholars, and audiences alike to experience the intensity, violence, joy, and humanity of one of today's most uncompromising choreographic voices.

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

Traces of Dance brings together scores, drawings, sketches, notes, graphics and paintings, which contributes to define a textuality of movement between writing and image.

The drawings and notations of choreographers rarely come before the public eye; and yet they are far more than simple memory aids. Several types of speech and writing have been called upon to lead the viewer's perception through the traces that the dancing body lays down. While these texts are not all concerned with the specific practices of dance, they all deal with the most profound contribution that a knowledge of the moving body brings to our culture, to our lives.

With Georges Appaix, Dominique Bagouet, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Régine Chopinot, Merce Cunningham, Philippe Decouflé, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Roxane Huilmand, Isaac, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rudolf Laban, Daniel Larrieu, Jean-Marc Matos, Dana Reitz, Hervé Robbe, Kellon Tomlinson, Mary Wigman, André Lorin, Vaslav Nijinski, Louis-Guillaume Pécour, Pierre Rameau, Bob Wilson.

Texts by Daniel Dobbels, Jean-Noel Laurenti, Laurence Louppe, Valérie Preston-Dunlop, René Thom, Paul Virilio.

Handwerk revives Berthold Wolpe’s early type design, originally called Wolpe Kursiv and cut in metal by Paul Koch in 1932. It first appeared in a 1936 craft symbol book featuring unique blackletter capitals. Due to persecution as a Jewish designer under the Nazi regime, Wolpe’s work faced delays and alterations and was finally released in 1952 in a modified form. Handwerk captures the original hand-lettered feel and includes stylistic sets that reference both the 1952 release and the original blackletter capitals, providing a historical perspective on Wolpe’s type design.

This Handwerk specimen is edited by Hammer (David Schatz & Sereina Rothenberger) with Philipp Herrmann and designed by Rietlanden Women’s Office. It accompanies the release of the same name font on www.outofthedark.swiss.

In 2019 SOTA finished the first Fair Arts Almanac. The content of the book was generated during a week long summer camp in 2018 with about 70 contributors. The result was a bundling of tips & tricks, statements & demands, visions & ideas, dates & data, testimonies & voices, addresses & announcements on fairness within the complex relationships between the artistic, political and economic sphere. The compilation of various contributions in this first edition was deliberately associative and open for debate, full of contradictions, loose ends and inconsistencies.

The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.

Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—defined by warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to unify the two civilizations. In the face of great hostility, outright threats, and the pain of separation from his family, he makes an unprecedented trip to Urras. Greater than any concern for his own wellbeing is the belief that the walls of hatred, distrust, and philosophic division between his planet and the rest of the civilized universe must be torn down. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and explore differences in customs and cultures, determined to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he finds not the egotistical philistines he expected, but an intelligent, complex people who warmly welcome him. But soon the ambitious scientist and his gift is seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

Typeface by Bea Schlingelhoff, from the Project "Women against Hitler"

Eric Bell & Kristoffer Frick: Rainbow Rope, 2017 1, Crystal Table (II), 2017 2, 63, Platonic Solid, 2018 64, Kolumne 3, Sara MacKillop: WC2N 4, 10, 15, 24, California Cannabis Legalization 9, Letzte Ausgabe der Spartakusbriefe, Oktober 1918 11, Delia Gonzales 16-21, Cordula Daus 22, Christina Irrgang 25, Eric Ellingsen 26, Hugo Canoilas: L’ô 29, 30, 35-38, Sadie Plant 31, Markus Krottendorfer: aus der Serie TERMINAL, 2017 32, Kate Rich: Feral Trade 39, Julia Knass 44, Walter Hetzer: World Trade Center 1972 46, Lidl, Wiedner Hauptstraße 15, Wien (ehemals Generali Foundation, gebaut 1993-95, Architektur Jabornegg & Pálffy) 50, One Hour and a Half in the Life of Ztscrpt 62-52

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.

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

Once upon a time there was a shopping center just off Dam Square, a stone’s throw from the Madame Tussauds, not far from Primark, two streets across De Bijenkorf overshadowing the Magna Plaza, and just a couple doors down the Royal Palace in the middle of Amsterdam. It was the place where drag queen Tuu Lipa performed and Yeung sold eau de car engine oil. It was also where Mr. R looked for his human lover, where Inez became a millionaire, and where Yahoo launched its metaverse. “Welcome to the YAniverse,” greeted the Yahoo assistant…

Retail Vérité is the outcome of writing workshops organized by A Maior at San Serriffe. Through a blend of improvisation, larping and speed dating, the participants sketched characters and dialogues on-site.
This cohort featured Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu and others.

A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has taken place within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Verité, A Maior’s first novella.

With A Maior, Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement

Featuring contributions from various artists and authors, including Louis Morelle, Persis Bekkering & Crisis Acting. 

Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde gathers the work of over forty artists, writers, and philosophers to address the trajectories of the underground avant-garde digital art-world. A variety of topics and visual styles are represented in this anthology, but particular attention is paid to CoreCore, the DIY experimental filmmaking meta-trend which emerged on TikTok in the dusk of 2020. In part an anthology of critical and experimental essays, in part a curatorial artbook, in part a volume of conference proceedings, this text invites the viewer to explore the grassroots conference of a particular cybercultural moment. 

This book follows on from the proceedings of All Things are Nothing to Us, a symposium on CoreCore and the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, held on December 2nd. 2023, at the School of Visual Arts, NYC; organized by 0nty and OnMyComputer (Dylan Smith). 

FEATURES WORK FROM:
0nty - Dylan Smith (OnMyComputer) - John-Robin Bold - Bebe_Crotte - Societyiftextwall - Aemmonia - Emonie Fay Chetwin (Xleepyfay) - Alice Aster - Anastasija Pavić - Anastasiia Pishchanska (shelestvetrovki) - Ash Ingram - ChaoticRhizomatic - Crisis Acting - Dana Dawud - Daniel Neeman - Edson Javier Rogil - Hunter Thompson - Joe Iovino (Levels of Nuance) - John DeSousa - John Michael - Jomel - Liam Harding (X._.pulp) - Louis Higgins - Louis Morelle - Maria Puglisi - Mason Noel - Mischa Dols - i0 xen0 - Nicholas Sanchez (Wonderful Cringe) - Nick Vyssotsky - Nikolaos Sakkadakis - Orion Arnold - Persis Bekkering - Redacted Cut - Reed McDonaldson - Rokas Vaičiulis - Rozzlyn Agnes K - Soham Adhikari - Uba - Zoey Solomon - Machine Yearning - Jordi Viader Guerrero - Tommaso Campagna - Kali Masoch  

"In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams figures imagination as the springing off point to greater connection with the world and its gentle motions. ‘It is spring,’ he writes: ‘life again begins to assume its normal appearance as of “today.” Only the imagination is undeceived.’ Embracing the haecceity of the everyday and allowing the imagination to make silent and surprising connections are ways to withhold the deceptiveness of relying on old habits of thinking and writing. 

Ziddy Ibn Sharam’s Working Museum begins with another quotation from Spring and All: ‘There is not confusion – only difficulties’, and the sequence offers delicate, poetical examinations how the confusions and frustrations of interpersonal communication are beneficent difficulties to be embraced and considered in gentle depth. This is a gorgeous sequence of poems, offering generous, gracious and graceful glimpses of a family’s birthday pilgrimage to Amberley Museum and Heritage Centre in Sussex. Working Museum is a tour de force of delicate poetry of feelings and feeling through feelings in a world of wordless connections and contacts, navigating the liminal but intimately understood spaces between two brothers and their family. In these poems, 

Sharam is trying to be still in language, as smiles, touches and profound intimacies are exchanged. Observing and being in his brother’s presence during this special time of spring, Sharam re-learns to experience, to become ‘plugged’ in, as he writes, to new ‘switchboards’ of sensation, thought and poetic possibility. The ‘old machines’ of mental expectation and habit are, in the presence of his other-sensing brother, found wanting for the appreciation of his ‘intellect just as it is’. Here, Sharam learns to ‘do things minimally’ and to revel in the ‘seismic proportions’ of the apparently mundane. Sharam and his readers are offered a space to share in a brother’s beautifully vivid world and are privileged to witness a profound, ‘beginning, // again." - Gareth Farmer

A day can be a composition not unlike an essay. Full of possibilities, full of limitations, bound by universal structures and marked by idiosyncratic desires. You go on walks. You read. You do your chores. All the while memory and other forms of imagination keep time with you. Books are strange companions; writing is a lonely thing rich with consolations.

Certain Things is a text by Claudia La Rocco, created with and through ideas such as these.

Published September 2022.