Books

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.

Written in response to three “physical” photographs, ‘Broken Villas’ contains and considers how a vessel might clasp tightly to known volumetric identities, but also loom with a set of accentuated clues towards otherness: the excavated seams in the earth and what we fill those holes with, imaginary or otherwise; the glacial erraticism of the boulder; the queer crimping of a hotel pillowcase; the modes via which objects are housed as display, but also packaged away, with sorrow, with fear, with erotism etc.

Twenty Bookmarks is a result of Production & Workflow class of Graphic Design Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Ba1 Class of 2026.

Prompt Thinking explores how artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the nature of thought. In the age of generative AI, prompting becomes more than a technical instruction: it emerges as a philosophical practice.

This book arises from an experiment with AI in which the fictional philosopher Jianwei Xun sparked global debate by publishing a book about power and perception in the digital age. That book, Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality, was written with the assistance of AI. Rather than casting AI as either savior or threat, Prompt Thinking proposes a third way: conscious dialogue with artificial intelligence as a means to expand critical awareness. The book shows how critical philosophical engagement with AI can produce unexpected insights while preserving intellectual autonomy.

Part theoretical framework, part methodological provocation, Prompt Thinking offers tools for navigating cognitive transformation. It proposes an ethics of the threshold, neither rejecting technological change nor surrendering to it.

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection molding factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor—making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.

Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.

MATTHEW RICE was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in poetry from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, highly commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and included in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.

Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.

kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil. 

kathy wu is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program.

She Will Last as Long as Stones has the inter-genre brilliance of asking where materials originate, and following that question until writing becomes a kind of listening with stone, with metal, for magnetic reverberations, for the thinking at the back of the cave.
— Bhanu Kapil

There just might be currents coursing through landscape, language, software, and labor—presences that escape extraction and will not be denied. She Will Last as Long as Stones looks into the multiple temporalities and operations of many things: material place, mining, social and scientific documentation, computation, migrant women's work, and mother-daughter relations, constellating them into a poetics of wondrous design and resonant beauty. 
— Kimberly Alidio

She Will Last as Long as Stones is a subtle circuit that conducts a charge but (paradoxically) remains open. wu's intricate parataxis offers readers fertile resistance, while simultaneously leading us to grounded revelations about the intertwined materialities of technology, language, and memory.
— Allison Parrish

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

Violet and Rainer, over the course of a long phone call, become hosts of an imaginary literary summit where attendees spar over casualwear, animal metaphors, fascist art, bodily autonomy, and other problems of the everyday. A collaborative work of friendship as much as the occasion for philosophical scholarship, where one can find the answers to burning questions like: What makes sex good? What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone? What does my nipple piercing mean for your nipples? And how have you been, lately?

This book has been self-published for Latvian artist and poet Jelena Glazova's solo exhibition “Person with the last name Universe” at Riga contemporary art space (July - August 2026).  The exhibition is the artist’s act of feminist guerrilla resistance within the symbolic territory of contemporary phallocracy. The source and central figure of the post-gender universe conjured by Glazova is the Person with the last name Universe, whose creative strategy the artist unpretentiously calls Glazovism. 

Jelena Glazova (Belgium/Latvia) is a poet and multimedia artist who combines visual elements, experimental sound, installation and poetic text in her projects. As an artist, she has participated in international festivals and projects in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey and other countries. Among the most notable exhibitions are "Identification of a Woman" at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2010) and "Elements of a Puzzle" at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2011). She is the author of four poetry collections. Glazova's poetry has been translated into 12 languages. Since 2012, she has given more than 200 performances in 18 countries. She is the co-founder of two poetry festivals in Riga: "Blood of a Poet" (2014–2016) and "Poetry without Borders" (2017–2022). https://www.jelena-glazova.com/

Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity.

This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.

Essay #16

Editor: M. Sullivan
Design in collaboration with S. De Bondt

Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. 

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

If Aurora Mattia is a switchboard operator, then Unsex Me Here is her call log. Please hold. There’s someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.

Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.

David Hoyle (b.1962, Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a performance and visual artist. His work over the last 30+ years has referenced gender, politics, identity, mental health issues and the ongoing fight for equality.

Hoyle came to prominence in the ‘90s as The Divine David, a kind of anti-drag queen whose lacerating social commentary – targeting both bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene, which he called, “the biggest suicide cult in history” – was offset by breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm. Following a couple of outré late-night Channel 4 TV shows and a part in the movie Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes, Hoyle killed off The Divine David, during a spectacular show at the Streatham International Ice Arena in 2000 and retreated to Manchester for “a period of reflection”.

He returned to television screens in 2005 in Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley, then began performing live again, under his own name. Hoyle’s biting satire, bravura costumes, wicked comic timing, and compelling charisma remained intact.

Hoyle is also a prolific painter often painting in his live shows. His paintings are deeply personal, and tackle the same themes as his performances, incorporating domestic waste, flyers, newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, and more, which reinforce his disdain for the ruling-class bourgeoisie.

This is the first book dedicated to Hoyle’s paintings, offering an edited selection of works made between 2010 and 2022. At Hoyle’s request, all of the works are published undated: thus, emphasising their timelessness, timeliness, relevance, and urgency to the desperate age in which we now find ourselves!

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

A children's book by Johannes van de Weert, a veteran of the punk underground (Rondos, The Ex, Red Rat, Raket).

The Adventures of Red Rat and BIGGO – The Present is a remake of Bram konijn en Piet de muis [Bram the Rabbit and Piet the Mouse], a 1982 children's book by Johannes van de Weert, a veteran of the Dutch punk underground who played with Rondos and The Ex, and who was the force behind Red Rat and Raket editions.
The Present is a 2010 remake telling the story of a bully pig who terrifies a poor rat on a daily basis. After a while, the rat falls ill with fear and has to stay in bed. The lonely, evil pig has no one to play with and becomes depressed. The pig gives the rat a present—a bunch of beautiful flowers—and all is well. Now the two can play together.
The 2010 remake, featuring different characters and intended for a North Korean audience, was never published. The 2025 English version opens with an introduction by Van de Weert, telling a bizarre story of a failed political career and an absurd vaudeville class struggle behind the seemingly harmless educational children's book.

Johannes van de Weert was a cartoonist active in the Rotterdam punk and squatter's movements of the 1980s. He was a singer with the punk band De Rondos and he started self-publishing small comic booklets in the late 1970s. He created his character "Redrat" for the fanzine Raket in 1980. The character soon became an icon for the squatter's movement.

L’or et la cocaïne sont les deux matériaux bruts de Mon musée de la Cocaïne. C’est au cours de leur transformation et raffinement que ces deux substances ramènent avec elles une histoire de l’oppression et de l’esclavage.

Dans ce livre, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig prend comme point de départ la proposition de bâtir un musée de la Cocaïne (qui serait l’image reflétée du musée de l’Or de la Banque de la République à Bogotá) et dresse un portrait sans concession de la vie des mineurs afro-colombiens aspirés dans le monde dangereux de la production de cocaïne au fin fond de la forêt tropicale, sur la côte pacifique de la Colombie. Il décrit la violence, la pauvreté, mais aussi les croyances qui surgissent des marais envahis de mangroves et des rivières tropicales qui, pendant plus de cinq cent ans, ont attiré, ruiné et décontenancé Amérindiens, orpailleurs, conquistadors et pirates, esclaves africains, ingénieurs russes et guérilleros marxistes.

Mon musée de la Cocaïne se présente comme un assemblage éclectique d’histoires et d’anecdotes, présenté comme autant de salles d’un hypothétique musée de la Cocaïne, au sein desquelles le lecteur est invité à déambuler, en croisant des références qui vont de Charles Dickens à Franz Kafka en passant par la poésie de Seamus Heaney.

Facsimilé d'un carnet inédit de Pascal Doury réalisé par Jonas Delaborde (Der Vierte Pförtner Verlag) et co-produit par les Editions l'Amazone, réalisé dans le cadre de la publication des Archives Elles Sont de Sortie suite à la parution de Choquer le monde à mort. Elles Sont de sortie. Bruno Richard - Pascal Doury.

Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldua's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.

Great is the Power of the Name considers the works of authors Elena Ferrante, Pauline Reáge, Karl Ove Knausgård, Colette and artist Lee Lozano. 

In 2016, when Anne-Mette had invited Signe to take on the role as editor of her text The Institute of Applied Speech, they both began reading Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Novels. They were specifically fascinated by the author’s use of pseudonym. Anne-Mette's Institute of Applied Speech was a tale of a fictive place, a pseudo-topos, and Elena Ferrante’s ideas about the pseudonym as a space for the writing itself was useful in thinking about fictive authorship. In a number of written interviews, Elena Ferrante unfolds the feminist perspective of her use of pseudonym. They were attracted by the idea that the author could avoid the biographical question; that she could disappear behind her own writing. 

To them, the artist Lee Lozano is the ghostly presence of hard-core moralist and humorous fuck-off art from another decade. During the course of her life, Lozano continuously reconfigured and gradually dissolved her own name, starting from Leonore Knaster ending up with E. Her work Boycott Women, in which she decides not to have any contact with women, expands the notion of feminist critique. 

Great is the Power of the Name publishes a readership interested in the position of the artist, and how it conditions the way we make art.

toffe. édition générale
publication issue de reproduction générale,
système de production d'actions graphiques
développé en trois temps :
projection générale
dispositif multi-écran, pour la chaufferie
galerie de l'école supérieure des arts décoratifs de strasbourg
du 14 février au 23 mars 2003
présentation, édition générale
école nationale supérieure des beaux-arts d'alger
du 24 mai 2003
exposition, occurrence récente
diffusion, édition générale
galerie madé, paris
du 12 mai au 5 juin 2003

Building on the foundations of the first two issues, Synthetic Agencies invites a rethinking [and unthinking] of the assumptions, polarities, and discontents surrounding the notion of agency. Traditionally defined in Western thought as the capacity to act and effect change, agency is inseparable from questions of power and the often invisible structures through which power operates. The various contributions interrogate how agency is produced, constrained, or distributed through the systems of knowledge, design, and governance that shape our built environments, technologies, media, and cultures. They were are invited to right (as much as write on) agency, reflecting on how it operates across different scales and contexts, and imagining alternative worlds or configurations. Ultimately, Synthetic Agencies understands agency not as a fixed attribute but as a contested lens through which we might read, reshape, or resist the conditions of the present.

With contributions by Amine Houari, Driss Ksikes, Fehras Publishing Practices, Hamed Sinno, Helga Tawil-Souri, Lada Hršak, Mayada Madbouly, Myriam Ababsa, Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Ola Hassanain, Omer Shah, OPPA, Salma Barmani, Samia Henni, Tarek El-Ariss, Zaidoun Hajjar.