Books

Jaime Gil de Biedma is the most original and influential among the poets known as the ‘50’s Generation in Spain, and is considered the greatest Spanish poet to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. His life and literary career were bracketed almost entirely by the rise and fall of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, notorious for the suppression of literature. Born in 1929, Gil de Biedma was six years old when García Lorca was murdered in Granada at the outbreak of the Civil War, and his collected poems, Las personas del verbo, first appeared in 1975, the year Franco died. What is surprising is that Gil de Biedma was a leftist, homosexual poet from the Catalan capitol, Barcelona – all of Franco’s favorite things – who not only published books of autobiographical poetry in Spain but was known as a poet of social conscience as well as erotic lyricism. Like other Spanish poets of his time, he chose his words carefully. Gil de Biedma died of AIDS in 1990.

If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) consists of an extensive bilingual selection of Gil de Biedma’s poetry, including all of his most well-known work. The book additionally consists of a Foreword by Spencer Reece, Jaime Gil de Biedma’s short essay “I wanted to be the poem,” and two different essays on Gil de Biedma and the art of translation by James Nolan, the volume’s translator.

Rebecca Rowland is one of the sharpest writers that I know. This little book combines elements of life in the publishing industry, #MeToo, and a literal boogeyman. It’s long been my desire to do more “social horror.” And Shagging the Boss is the stick I use to measure other submissions in that vein. (Back Cover Text) “Lesson number one: don’t get attached to anyone. Being a cannibal is the only way to truly succeed in this business.” He placed one hand on the door handle, then thought a moment and smiled to himself. “The problem is, once you take a bite, it will never be enough.” After a fortuitous encounter at a local book convention, a liberal arts graduate accepts a position at a flashy publishing company under the tutelage of its charismatic owner only to learn that the press is led, and fed, by a literal boogeyman.

“Rowland tells an exceptionally tight and fast-paced tale about a unique legendary creature stalking the modern publishing industry” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Licker and 100 Jolts

“Rowland’s tale is a transgressive mindf*ck that will leave you irreparably unnerved” — L. Stephenson, author of The Goners

“Rowland has a narrative mastery that makes you feel as if a good friend is pulling you in close to tell you some special secret…You’ll be left shook” —Tim Murr, Stranger With Friction

This book follows my journey of launching, growing, and ultimately failing in the adult entertainment industry. It explores society’s complex relationship with porn and sex education, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and the struggles of working in a deeply stigmatized space. Sometimes funny, often dramatic, and always surprising, it offers an unfiltered look at the business side of porn and what it really takes to challenge the status quo.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

This book project introduces the history of eunuchism through auto-theory, historiography, historical fiction and poetry, exploring this identity in the ancient world and what kind of echoes can be heard in the present day. By overlapping various histories, and drawing the line between eunuchs in antiquity and contemporary gender discourse, Odete makes a case for a history of gender that hasn’t yet been written, asking what is the relevance of eunuchs to the history of art? And what does the study of the eunuch expose about the current world? 

Edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart
Proofread by Callum Dean
Designed by Tjobo Kho & Vlad Omelianenko

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.

Mucus in My Pineal Gland is the debut collection of New York-based artist and writer Juliana Huxtable (born 1987). Gathering poems, performance scripts and essays, this startling volume expands Huxtable's critique of gender, sexuality, politics, whiteness and history while establishing her as a singular poetic voice.

Juliana Huxtable is a New York City-based writer, performer, and artist. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Candy, Tropical Cream, and Mousse. She was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, curated by Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Natasha Stagg is the author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 and Surveys: A Novel, both published by Semiotext(e). Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Texte Zur Kunst, n+1, Spike Art, Flash Art, Dazed, V, Vice, 032c, and other publications.

Blade Pitch Control Unit is a gathering of Sean Bonney’s work in poetry between 2000-2005. It collects together all the work from his previous pamphlets that he still feels is valid, plus a number of previously unpublished pieces.

The presentation of this work in a single volume makes clear the scope of his project as a psychogeographic/historical exploration of the possibilities of political verse that would seek to obliterate the pitfalls of simple protest or the expression of easily assimilable opinions.

The work moves from psychogeographical registerings of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs at the time of the Millennium Dome, through excavations of the ghosts of millennial heresies still present in contemporary London, and into a charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective.

The events of recent history play a major role, sometimes obliquely, sometimes less so, but Bonney refuses to allow his voice to be merely an outraged commentary on contemporary woes. Instead, he presents a poetry that makes clear that the protestor is also culpable, but equally a poetry that understands that only through a registering of this position can a way out be found.

For Bonney, a poem is typically a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows.

In her Manifesto, Charlotte Posenenske stated: "I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems."
Developing her artistic practice throughout the 1960s, Posenenske produced a body of work that uniquely combined several strands of the art of the period: conceptualism, minimalism, and socially engaged participatory art. Her Manifesto, published in Art International in May 1968, lays out the social demands on art as well as the impossibility of fulfilling those demands. Shortly after its publication, Posenenske left the art world behind to pursue her studies in sociology, undertaking a new career in that field.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows. The book features an essay written by curator Erlend Hammer on the role of documentary photographs in the circulation of works of art. 

The book was published in conjunction with the eponymous show at the Haugar Art Museum in Tønsberg, Norway—the first full-scale presentation of the artist's oeuvre in Scandinavia. The exhibition showcased works from all the artist's major series of modular sculpture. Consisting of works made over the course of less than 12 months, between 1967 and 1968, preceding the abrupt end to Posenenske's career as an artist, the exhibition had the character of a snapshot. We are left wondering whether her withdrawal from the art world was a logical or necessary consequence of the development of the series. What are we to do with Posenenske's assertion that art is powerless to effectively change society for the better?

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

A debut collection from the poet, artist and designer, a suite of unfaithful translations/transversions of works drawn from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, a bunch of flowers in decay, pressed and frayed, ‘a flock of pockmarked words.’

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue. — Mia You

Alix Chauvet is a Swiss-French poet and graphic designer based in Amsterdam, taking pleasure in the possibilities of translation. She received her BA in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, 2020), and has since been working independently and in collaboration with contemporary artists. Investigating the relationships between language and body, intimacy and collectivity, past and contemporary, her hybrid practice covers a wide range of visual and linguistic experiments from artist’s book design to experimental translation. Her method is rooted in decelerating the creative process through the use of analogue and unprofitable techniques such as cut-outs, letterpress, linocut, handwriting and painting. Chauvet’s poetic approach follows the same logic, prioritising English over her mother tongue as a way to revise language with both critical detachment and a degree of identification. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Blackbox Manifold, and Cyclamen is her debut collection.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. 

When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.

Errant Journal No. 6 takes up the topic of debt in order to challenge the idea that it is something rational, natural or inevitable.

The contributions in the issue address the ways in which debt and its language hold power over us and organize obedience; from its role in geopolitics to its associations with shame and guilt through moral and religious connotations. Together they reveal how the personal is always connected to the structural. Crucially, the issue also features contributions that address ways of thinking about debt outside Western/neoliberal hegemony and introduce instances of resistance to the violence and inequality inherent to debt. We’ve made additional space in this issue to address the intensified struggle for Palestinian liberation and its relations to debt/guilt and finance.

Contributors: Ian Beattie, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sultan Doughan, Toon Fibbe, Ibrahim Kombarji, Levi Masuli, Jamie McGhee, Kristina Millona, Bahar Noorizadeh, Falke Pisano, Taring Padi, Dalia Wahdan

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

The Hortus  project is an open investigation into the nature of seemingly common objects through 'Floriography', urban gardens, and the history of female rights. Hortus was inspired by urban gardens in West Amsterdam and created with its plants by Lilia Luganskaia. 

Joanna Cresswell about the 'Hortus':

History teaches us that a language of flowers can communicate endless things about the culture in which it emerged, and herein lies Lilia Luganskaia's interest. Taking inspiration from the world of 19th Century sentimental flower books, Hortus presents itself as a set of notes towards a modern handbook for contemporary floriography, considering what the discipline might look like today. By collecting common flora across one year in the urban gardens around her home in Amsterdam and cross-referencing their meanings with publications from the past, Luganskaia reflects on their natures, their roles, and the symbolic familiarity they might hold for the communities living with them. A female artist and reader of the twenty-first century, she seeks out the essence of modern life through her lens, and through flowers, just like the women who came before her. 

Lilia Luganskaia (1990) Russian - Dutch multidisciplinary artist and author, based in Amsterdam. In her artistic practice, Lilia uses her background in documentary techniques to focus on what she calls ‘investigating reality’.  Her practice is research-based, Lilia decodes abstract notions such as love, tourism, bureaucracy, politics, and feminism through the use of constructed images, sculptures, videos, and installations. One of the key elements of her work is to understand multiple aspects of the photographic image.

Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean, photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.

For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

In Bewogen selfies onderzoekt Obe Alkema de verhouding tussen landschap en herinnering. Wat treft hij aan bij terugkeer naar belangrijke plaatsen uit zijn geheugen? Wat herinnert hij zich niet, maar Google wel? Is er een gedenkschrift te puren uit zijn metadata?

Memoires, rechtstreeks verteld en met omwegen, uit eerste hand en van horen zeggen. Archieven en herinneringen eisen spreektijd, houden het niet meer droog of worden tot spreken gebracht. Wat hebben ze eigenlijk te melden? Ze lopen helemaal leeg, net als Alkema zelf. Een leven zoals zovele, poedelnaakt en geretoucheerd, vol zin en onzin.

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.